PixelPoint Technologies

Industry
Retail/Hospitality

Sending Back the Paper-based System
Traditionally, restaurants employed paper-based systems to take orders, get them to the kitchen, generate checks and track inventory. Even as many restaurants have computerized over the years, their systems often fail to meet requirements and justify costs.

An application powered by SQL Anywhere Studio from Sybase's iAnywhere subsidiary is catching the attention of restaurateurs. PixelPoint 2000 is one of the first multi-featured, SQL-based hospitality point of service (POS) applications designed expressly for the restaurant industry.

"Ours is probably one of the very few hospitality applications that uses a full-fledged SQL engine—SQL Anywhere Studio—to drive both the front- and back-ends of the application," said Lino D'Angicco, director of marketing and operations at PixelPoint Technologies. "Traditional hospitality applications use a proprietary POS front-end that exports data to the back-end, usually a flat-file database. With these applications, however, there are often problems with performance and reliability—two things no restaurant operator wants to hear about."

PixelPoint Chooses SQL Anywhere
An earlier version of PixelPoint POS also ran off a flat-file database. It was innovative, being one of the industry's first 32-bit versions of a hospitality application. But its limitations sparked D'Angicco to search for a SQL engine he could embed in the application to improve its performance and make it more robust.

"It was clear that using databases like Paradox, d-Base or Access wasn't going to do the trick," he said. "You can't run a busy restaurant on a system that crashes once a week. Customers told us, ‘Give me something that's easy to use, that doesn't fall apart and that has the flexibility to let me customize it to fit our business model—a solution that I can just install and forget about.'"

PixelPoint took this customer feedback to heart and set about recreating the application on a SQL foundation.

"Our user interface was clean and easy to use, but our foundation wasn't strong enough to deliver the advantages of a 32-bit application," D‘Angicco said. "Through aggressive research, we could see first-hand how various products were performing and the kinds of problems people were having. iAnywhere Solutions' SQL Anywhere Studio was just what we needed—a reliable, scalable, full-featured SQL database that could be affordably embedded into the application and that required virtually zero maintenance."

Ease of Use and Wireless Connectivity Overcome Restaurateurs' Concerns
PixelPoint 2000 is sold exclusively through resellers, such as Ideal Inventory Systems. One of its clients is Cincinnati-based Skyline Chili, a regional institution in business since 1949.

Peter Perdikakis, a Skyline franchisee with three locations, wanted to know how PixelPoint could help him. His restaurants were already the fastest-serving restaurants in town. The key to speedy service was that the wait staff immediately shouted customer orders to the steam table where they were prepared. No computer system would be faster than that, he figured. And slower service would cost him business.

"I thought about how we could get the best part of the system—inventory control and menu flexibility—without slowing our service, and I realized that the only way it could work is with handhelds," Perdikakis said.

As it turned out, PixelPoint offered a wireless version, enabling wait staff to enter orders and fire them off to the steam table instantly. This solved the service problem, and in the process, Perdikakis gained a better inventory control system that he could review anytime—without interfering with the restaurant operation.

"The system has given us a lot of data capture capability for inventory, timekeeping and payroll," Perdikakis said. "It's eliminated errors in addition and tax calculation and has even added a little speed to our service operation. It does everything I need a system to do."

"One of the Best Decisions We've Made"
"We have a reputation in the market for a very easy to use, very reliable and very intuitive product," D'Angicco said. "Our end-users can get the system up and running within an hour. While other restaurant operators using other systems have to spend significant time configuring them and troubleshooting problems, our customers can focus on their restaurants."

PixelPoint can scale up to 1,000 or more users for large chains or large stadium concession operations. The company's head office enterprise solution, also running SQL Anywhere, enables operators to collect, analyze and manage POS data from a single location across the Internet.

"Embedding SQL Anywhere into PixelPoint 2000 was one of the best decisions we've made," D'Angicco said. "It's absolutely key to the reliability, scalability and ease of use of our application. It's been rock solid and we haven't had any problems."