This is an advancement on our existing cafe module, which uses a touchscreen menu system to quickly and accurately take counter orders for food and drink.
The restaurant sub-system includes features that handle the specific requirements of a bistro or restaurant offering waiter/waitress service.
Waiters/waitresses can log in and out of one or more EPoS terminals within the restaurant using barcoded ID cards or Dallas keys. Once logged in they can open a new ’bill’ for a table/customer, against which details of the food and drink ordered can be recorded.
The ‘bill’ can be updated as necessary and, eventually, printed for presentation to the customer. Once the customer has agreed the charges and payment has been made it becomes the sales receipt.
The restaurant sub-system has, as you might expect, the ability to send information to a kitchen printer or to a bar printer to prompt the preparation of food and drinks you know the sort of thing.Martini - shaken not stirred. Messages can also be appended to an order such as “steak well cooked”, “no mayo”, “hold the onions” (personally I hate onions with my Martini), etc.
The module is aimed, primarily, at retailers who offer a restaurant service to their customers as an adjunct to their main business, such as garden centres, farm stores, etc.

Although, information is commonly sent by email, this does not really save much time. For example, if you send a purchase order to your supplier by e-mail, details of the order still have to be keyed into to their sales ordering system. before it can be processed. And the same is, of course, true of any data sent to you from your suppliers.
The solution is EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). It’s not a new technology, having been around since the late 1960s. However, it has, up until now, generally been the preserve of bigger retailers, mainly due to cost and the complexity of operation.
We are pleased to say that we’ve been working on this problem and are currently developing a low cost, easy to use, EDI module to add to our already feature rich WinRetail package. The module will be ready later this year in the interim we would be glad to hear your views/questions .

The Garden Store, which operates seven garden centres in the Midlands, was founded in 2001 after Neil Stevens and Marcus Eyles had a vision to create a garden centre company that would offer fresh, top quality, plants and gardening goods at great prices.
The first two of their seven sites, at Charlecote and Billing, are in the process of being installed with training taking place at Charlecote. Once these two have bedded in the system will be implemented at the remaining locations during February/March.
All the centres will be using RF (Radio Frequency) hand-held data terminals operating via a Wi-Fi network, to handle stock receipts, stocktaking and other peripatetic functions.
We will update you with the progress of the Garden Store roll-out in the next newsletter.

The survey revealed the growing importance of a multichannel approach for SME’s in the current retail environment.
Research also showed that social and mobile commerce will play a large role in retail strategies for smaller retailers over the coming year, with 90% planning to implement a social or mobile strategy over the next twelve months. Of these, 53% said they plan to sell across both platforms in 2012, while 27% plan to use social commerce, such as Facebook and Twitter, to extend their reach .
Alan McCammon, senior account manager at Corby + Fellas, said: “Moving towards a multichannel operation can appear a daunting task to smaller retailers however, it’s a natural extension of their existing operations and is far easier to set up and manage than it might at first seem.”
WinRetail makes it particularly easy to set and run an e-commerce platform offering the capability of creating a ‘virtual’ store that sells some/all the products available in the ‘bricks and mortar’ stores. The e-commerce module is fully integrated with the main stock system, so it is not necessary to maintain a separate stock records for the web side of the business.

A Click & Collect service is just one of the facilities that you could offer them. Shoppers consider service to be as important as good value, so if they can shop via the web with a store they like, choose what they want, reserve on-line and collect at their convenience they will invariably award you with their loyalty.
In addition, customers can use your e-commerce site as a ‘shop window’, with the ability to see: what’s new in stock, special offers and promotions. This is what multi-channel retailing is all about.
As an example, it is predicted that by 2015 about 5% of all garden related sales will be made online and that, more importantly, 46% of all garden purchases will have been influenced by a visit to a web site prior to store visit (from research by the Javelin Group). Although you may not be running a garden centre, these figures indicate the importance of having a website, not only for direct purchasing but as a ‘shop window’ prior to a store visit. Also, the ability to offer a Click & Collect service is likely to be of fundamental importance in the future.
Our innovative WinRetail system offers a fully integrated ecommerce module, which is very easy to set-up and maintain. It offers you the capability of creating a ’virtual’ store that sells all/some of the products sold in a physical store(s) with the benefit of avoiding the cost and the risk of finding a suitable location, shop fitting, buying stock and finding staff.
You don’t need to be a big player to benefit from ecommerce

Over the years we have built up a number of strategic partnerships, enabling us to offer our customers the widest possible range of high quality, and reliable services.
For example, we have worked with Switchnet Systems for over 15 years: they provide, install and maintain network cabling, radio frequency (RF) networks and surveillance cameras systems
Switchnet has provided RF network systems to many of our garden centre customers, where the vagaries of terrain and the large areas involved can be very challenging
One of our oldest partners is the Progress Corporation, who provide us with the tools that we use to develop our systems and the database management platform on which they run. The stability and reliability of Progress based software is of particular importance when it comes to retail systems.
Our partners are very important to us, but generally invisible to you. Remember, you will only ever have to call one number to get support for your software, hardware and ancillary systems.