News

Effective communication: Talking to the back office

December 2, 2004

Imagine a well-meaning dad who takes his son out for ice cream: Dad and Junior select their treats at the ice cream parlor's self-service kiosk, right down to the multicolored sprinkles. One problem - the ice cream parlor ran out of sprinkles an hour ago. Now Junior fights back tears as he and his father walk to the car.

This situation could have been avoided if the kiosk and back-office system communicated. As kiosk orders whittled down the supply of sprinkles, the kiosk would notify the inventory system, which would place the order and receive the shipment before Junior and his dad ever left home. Or at least the kiosk would have let Junior know at the time of ordering that he was out of luck.

Inventory control is not the only benefit of interoperability. If it's sweltering hot outside and business is brisk at the ice cream parlor, the stack of twenties inside the kiosk has probably hit capacity. If the kiosk can alert the back office, the manager can empty the cash cassette before a customer's bill is rejected.

And what if high demand and supplier shortage cause the price of sprinkles to skyrocket? With interoperability between the kiosk and back-office systems, the new price can be simultaneously pushed to all of the kiosks, effectively manifesting the law of supply and demand.

Ideally, kiosks and back offices will connect via a wireless network that frees the kiosk from a network cable. The kiosk can then be moved about the floor easily if, for instance, its location hasn't proved ideal. The data streams that travel back and forth from the kiosk to the server are encrypted to foil hacking attempts.

In the near future

Although he doesn't yet have any customers achieving this functionality with kiosks, Ed McGunn, president of Corporate Safe Specialists, knows it won't be long. "There has to be partnership between the suppliers of front office and back-office systems," said McGunn, a member of the Petroleum Convenience Alliance for Technology Standards, an organization that is taking the lead in standardization.

PCATS was founded to continue the work of the National Association of Convenience Stores' Technology Standards Project. PCATS has already developed an open protocol that allows data sharing in convenience and petroleum marketing facilities, but the kiosk industry has been slow to get on board.

John Hervey, executive director of PCATS, believes it's just a matter of educating the kiosk industry. "Kiosks can be integrated with back-office systems, but only through highly proprietary ways, and so it's expensive and requires a lot of unnecessary work. We've built standards for interfacing various systems throughout the store, and we'd like to be able to do it with kiosks."

Vendors from other technologies have found that interoperability is the key to profitability. Interoperability between devices and systems will ensure that when retailers purchase equipment from two different vendors, those systems will be able to communicate with each other. And when the front office and back office communicate, the consumer's expectations are met - even if that expectation is only sprinkles on a little boy's ice cream.