National Systems' Touch Screen: Efficiency To Go

Chicago-based National Systems, a provider of POS and call-center solutions for the food-service industry, shipped TMS/Quik Touch, a touch-screen order-taking option, earlier this month.

Jim Kargman, president of National Systems, said TMS/Quik Touch provides an interface that lets restaurant employees taking a phone order build a pizza by entering requested ingredients into a kiosk. As the pizza is built, a visual representation appears. The screen can be retrofitted to National Systems' existing DOS and Windows 2000 systems, which means restaurants can simply add it to their existing systems, Kargman said. The solution also accommodates orders placed over the Internet.

"Our POS system is the only solution on the market I'm aware of that has a direct tie into an online ordering facility," Kargman said. "Orders go from the customer to the online system in about 10 to 12 seconds from the time the customer presses the screen."

TMS/Quik Order holds a competitive advantage because a large percentage of pizza orders are made during a short period of time each day, he said. "So the better [employees can handle the rush, the more money [the restaurant makes," he said.

Ramon DeLeon, director of operations for Chicago-based Fisher Pizza and a TMS/Quik Touch beta tester, said the touchscreen's ability to operate on different platforms has allowed him to upgrade his systems without spending thousands of dollars.

A single TMS/Quik Touch terminal is handling half of the carryout and phone orders for one of Fisher Pizza's busiest locations. Employees like the touch-screen interface, DeLeon said. "Quik Touch makes it possible for any employee to confidently enter orders quickly and accurately," he said.

National Systems' solution uses the Cache database by InterSystems, a Cambridge, Mass.-based provider of database systems for Web applications, with more than 4 million users worldwide.

Julie Singer, senior account manager at InterSystems, said about 80 percent of the company's business is derived through solution providers.

Its flagship product, Cache, is a post-relational database with a multidimensional data and application server that offers fast and scalable objects and SQL, realtime analytics and transactional performance. Cache includes high-performance support for both Microsoft .Net and J2EE.

While InterSystems primarily focuses on the health-care market, Singer said it has a number of strategic relationships with niche-market solution providers such as National Systems.

"Food services is typically a low-margin business, but we don't look so much at that when we are deciding who we are going to work with," she said. "Besides, the notoriety of something like this is actually worth more than the revenue."

For stores operating on National Systems' Ultra TMS system, the TMS/Quik Touch option typically can be added for about $2,500 per touch screen, including hardware and software, the company said. Pricing for the complete Ultra TMS system, including TMS/Quik Touch, starts at $17,000 for four terminals.

The National Systems solution is about $8,000 to $18,000 less expensive per store compared with a touch-screen POS system offered by Domino's Pizza, Kargman said. The Domino's Pizza system, which is used by Domino's company-owned locations, was developed after Bain Capital bought a principal interest in the company in 1998.

National Systems sells technology to the franchise-owned Domino's locations, which account for about 75 percent of the operation's total coverage. There are about 7,100 corporate-owned and franchise-owned Domino's Pizza restaurants, which brought in $3.78 billion in sales during 2001,or about 400 million pizzas.