Ker’s WingHouse Bar & Grill is famous for its good food and good times. Now, the restaurant chain is known for good business sense as well: since the company has switched to Aloha as its point of sale system, it is realizing big savings in POS expenditures. Thanks to a comprehensive solution of products and services provided by Abacus, the chain is seeing efficiencies in everything from ringing up orders to processing and transmitting credit card transactions.
     The WingHouse, a chain of 14 restaurants, switched from another point of sale system to one provided by Abacus with products from Aloha. “The new solution makes all the difference in the world,” said Jason Dukes, IT manager at Ker Inc., the company that owns the WingHouse restaurants. “It’s like we’ve got an entirely new approach.”
     The transformation began in August 2001 when Ker IT administrators contacted Abacus CEO Rich Peterson with a cry for help. Ker executives complained that their current POS solution wasn’t adequate for their business, saying they were tired of having restaurants use faxes and phone calls to report end-of-day sales figures back to the company’s corporate headquarters.
     Abacus responded immediately. In the first 30 days, Abacus installed TableService software on the hardware left behind from the previous POS implementation.
     As Ker opened new WingHouse restaurants, Abacus outfitted each with new hardware, software and services. When the latest WingHouse opened in Jacksonville, every restaurant was up and running on Aloha.
     “The implementation is still going on as they continue to grow,” Peterson said. “When they open a new store, they order a system, we install it, and their IT people oversee it and schedule training.”
     According to Dukes, one of the keys to the relationship has been the responsiveness of Abacus when technical problems arise, all but eliminating the need for a technical support crew for the POS technology.
     At Radiant corporate headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga., Steve Daves, Director of Sales for the Aloha Hospitality division, echoed these sentiments, praising Abacus for its comprehensive solutions. “Abacus isn’t just selling POS technology, they’re selling their own solutions as well,” he said. “When Rich Peterson goes into a presentation, he doesn’t just show up and do a demo. He tries to determine a real business problem and come up with a tailored way to solve it.”
     In the past few months, Abacus has taken the project one step further and transitioned all of the WingHouse restaurants onto Aloha’s new Enterprise.com system, an ASP application that transmits information over the Internet.
     While most POS systems send out credit and gift card information one at a time over analog phone lines, the new system enables each terminal to submit transactions simultaneously. The system is quicker than ever, and transaction approval time has dropped from an average of 30 seconds to no more than five, Dukes said.
     What’s more, Peterson has expanded the new system to incorporate retail items, such as WingHouse T-shirts, hats, and mugs. WingHouse employees can add merchandise to a bill just as they would a dessert.
     “In the past, we have struggled with how to track these items,” said Dukes. “With Abacus and Aloha, it’s now all just part of the same efficient system.”

Excerpted from the 01/03/05 issue of CRN Magazine.