When people talk about what makes a great POS system, the same few terms crop up over and over again. Flexibility. Convenience. End-to-end integration. Speed. Customisation.
But what about another term – resilience? All of the above usual suspects do indeed have a big role to play in creating POS systems that help deliver a business’s goals and drive success. But that all depends fundamentally on one thing. Having a POS system that functions and performs reliably.
In a sign of the always-on connected world we live in, ‘resilience’ these days is often used as shorthand for network resilience, or the reliability of your network connection. This also is important in modern retail and hospitality IT. Cloud-based POS infrastructures are the norm. You need to be connected for them to work.
Resilience is also a term used frequently in cybersecurity. ‘Cyber resilience’ is, simply, the ability of an organisation to protect itself from, detect, respond to and recover from cyber attacks. It’s another priority created by today’s connected world. Leaving yourself exposed to the ever-growing threats of hackers and cybercrime can have disastrous consequences, from financial theft and data breaches to bringing your whole IT infrastructure to a standstill.
Hardware resilience
But there’s another type of resilience that’s just as important in customer-facing organisations. The digital world we live in might be cloud connected and software focused. But in a shop, a restaurant, a supermarket, a bar or a hotel, you still need hardware. POS terminals to process sales. Self-checkout and self-service kiosks to empower customers. Mobile POS to empower staff to deliver a more agile level of service.
All of these need to be tough and resilient. POS hardware comes in for heavy use. Terminals are in use eight, nine, ten hours or more a day, seven days a week. They rack up sale after sale, hands on touchscreens, buttons pressed, receipt printer and cash drawer mechanisms in motion. Under the hood, modern POS endpoints are packed with high capacity CPUs and ultra-fast RAM to handle large-scale computing tasks across the business quickly and efficiently. Like all electrical components, they generate heat and are prone to physical deterioration over time.
For businesses, any little glitch in their POS is a drag on productivity and performance, a threat to the quality of customer experience. A customer who finds a kiosk not working correctly may well get frustrated and walk away. A till working slowly will lead to a build up of increasingly frustrated customers having to queue. A checkout not working will reduce throughput capacity, leading to longer wait times and costing sales.
At the most catastrophic end of the scale, a number of years ago we reported that 40% of retailers estimated that a single hour of POS system outage would cost them £10,000, and 17% said it would cost them £100,000 an hour. The average cost of a single terminal being out of action is around £500 an hour.
AURES: Quality and durability
That is why, at AURES, we put such a big emphasis on the build quality and durability of all our products. Resilience in POS is about much more than network stability and cybersecurity. Hardware resilience is essential to the ambitions of our customers, and we take that very seriously.
Time and time again, clients feedback to us how impressed they are with the low volumes of support tickets they are having to raise for our products. With the emphasis we put on component quality, cutting-edge technology and precision engineering, AURES hardware just keeps running and running. That keeps repair and maintenance costs to a minimum, productivity high and allows our clients to keep delivering the very best experience possible to their customers. A great example of feedback on our hardware can be seen in this recent case study featuring our friends from Morleys Stores Group and Futura Retails Solutions.
It’s a simple equation. If you want long-term value from POS to underpin your business’s success, you need tough, resilient hardware. That’s what we always aim to deliver.