Dinerware CEO, Jeff Riley, participated as a Technology Pavilion education session panelist at the NRA Show in Chicago on May 25th. The session titled, “Restaurant Technology 101”, also featured Jim Melvin from Intelligent Transactions, Jeff Imm from Time Management, and Jeff Weiss from Dave & Busters on the panel.

The audience represented an equal mix of restaurant operators exploring POS systems for the first time and those who are well versed in POS systems that were attending to hear about new trends and directions in the future of POS system capabilities. Riley covered both areas of interest by speaking about things to consider when selecting a POS system as well as the many of the trends in POS technology and the importance of selecting an open system to support future integration of web and mobile ordering capabilities and the opportunity to integrate email, text messaging, and social media oriented marketing promotions using customer history data available in the POS system.

For restaurateurs interested in purchasing a POS system for the first time, Dinerware offers a POS Shopper’s Guide which offers an objective resource that describes important considerations for making technology investments in restaurant POS systems. The guide provides an overview to the importance of ease of use, knowing which POS features will be most useful to your restaurant, thinking about the ongoing costs of operating your system, and offering support for a broad range of hardware products.

For the advanced group of POS users, Riley stated, “Many POS systems support some level of web and mobile system integration, but many times POS system vendors make it difficult and costly for their customers to have the flexibility to choose their own approach. Dinerware’s strategy is to make 3rd party integration easy by offering open APIs that facilitate real-time access to our data. We are quite unique in offering such an open platform, but we realize restaurateurs don’t all share the same ideas for which marketing strategy will work most effectively for them.”