Interactive Menu

[darkranjha]

Emre / Mehmet,

      I wanted to give you guys two thumbs up for the software you have produced!!! My finacees father has an Indian restaurant and he would like to transition to a POS system rather than manual tracking of bills. I am currently a project manager but have 5 yrs of .net development experience, so I'm excited to do some development as well and hopefully be a proactive/productive member of the sambaPOS community. Once again thank you so much for your efforts on this product!! Could you tell me what services you plan on selling, I would like to help develop your business plan here in the US with restaurants and show my gratitude by trying to sell some of your services.

     I also wanted to ask your advice regarding an idea I have for the restaurant. I understand you integrate with RDP to support handheld devices, but what I'm thinking is to buy 15-20 android tablets to give the customers when they walk in as interactive menus and the ability to place their orders by themselves (self-serve). I plan on achieving this by purchasing an Android RDP client for the tablets and then setting up specific users for each table, meaning once you put in the code that we would display on the table, you would be logged in and only have access to that table. I haven't played around with the actions / triggers section, but from the quick glance that I took from the software it seemed like you could customize it to do just about anything. Do you think this will work, or do you believe there is a more efficient way?

Thanks!!!

[ericrevollo]

Hi, regarding your question, in some places they already use that, they have small screens where customers order what they want, but they use a specific module for customers so they can easily see what they order or cancel the order if they make a mistake.

As for accounts for specific tables I don't know if it is possible, but maybe playing with Users, TableViews and Departments you may manage to achieve that, in any case it's a good idea already in practice, the only concern would be: users being able to use the system, the fact they may not be able to see prices before choosing a product, and make sure they don't have access to payment options.

Now, in a future version would be great to have a client terminal for a specific table or tables, where customers, or even waiters,  can easily choose what they want and possibly see the price, I dare to say that it wouldn't be too hard to implement, let's hope we'll see that in the future

[emre]

Hello darkranjha, First of all thank you for your support to the project.

RDP solution is for Waiter terminals. We need something specifically created for getting customer orders. It is called e-menu.

There are lots of individual e-menu solutions that will immediately print order tickets from printers but they won't work integrated with SambaPOS. A personnel should enter printed orders manually to the system.

We are planing to create an integrated Android (or html5 maybe) client app for customer orders. This is not our final decision but most probably our fist commercial service will be selling paid versions of this app from Android market.

After bringing V3 to a better state I'll start programming that.

[darkranjha]

Emre,

    This sounds very exciting! I will be looking forward to the e-menu solution once v3 is stable.. Keep me in mind if you need help with QA, we will be implementing sambaPOS for our new restaurant (Columbus, OH USA) in March and I will post pictures as well! Once again thank you for all of your development efforts for this project!

Sincerely,
   Rohan

[emre]

Great! I'll be happy if you test V3 and let us know the issues you found. Thanks.