InfoGenesis POS is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as empower your business and Apple Pay integration.
N/A
Northstar Restaurant POS
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Custom Business Solutions (CBS) in Irvine, California offers Northstar, a restaurant dedicated point of sale system supporting all restaurants from quick serve to fine dining, as well as bars, cruises, and amusement parks.
The terminals themselves don't seem to be well designed and have the appearance of being put together with off-the-shelf components. Hiding cables can be challenging. The design is slim and svelte enough, but it has the appearance of being more fragile (although it doesn't appear be particularly so). These terminals are best when left in a single location, at least in our implementation as switching revenue centers requires IT involvement.
The Northstar Restaurant POS is the POS system specifically designed for Country Clubs. It works well in a Country Club scenario where things need to be customized to member preferences, and there are a large number of menu items. If there is a restaurant where the menu is simpler, without as much customization needed, the Northstar Restaurant POS may be a bit too large and cumbersome. The Northstar Restaurant POS is good for detail but not necessarily speed.
Integration with rGuest Seat is terrible, and it's a companion product. This definitely never lived up to its promise.
The boot process for the terminals is long and ridiculously unprofessional looking. There are some sloppy defaults for the boot process and the initial setup is needlessly complicated.
Shift management is confusing for staff, particularly when signing out at the end of a shift. Would like to see more work on this area.
Support is hit or miss with this platform. If you get a tech that knows the system, the experience is excellent. There have been more instances of escalated tickets going unanswered, which I deem unacceptable. Even if the answer is "I don't know" or "we can't do that" I expect an answer. Contrast this with VMware, who will file a bug report if they can't resolve the immediate issue and then will follow up with you. When it comes to IG support, I don't have confidence that they'll pursue a concern very far and they've been lax with follow-up
InfoGenesis had a great implementation team and worked with us closely on the rollout to ensure minimal disruption. Micros terminals had better design overall and looked like they'd have lasted for 100 years, but Oracle was not fun to work with. IG's reporting options have made our Finance people happy as well. We were concerned with multiple integrations on the platform it replaced, but all of these turned out to be non-issues and we were able to work with IG staff to get what we wanted out of it. I'd prefer the hardware to be thought out more thoroughly, as it's weak in appearance by comparison despite being very usable.
I have not used any other restaurant POS systems. I have heard there are more robust restaurant POS systems available; however, very few of them are so customizable for our needs. Being a Country Club, our focus is on member service. Northstar Restaurant POS allows us to have a large number of menu items available so we can serve our members effectively.
Our previous platform required more than occasional love and care and was hard to develop solutions for. InfoGenesis terminals don't have a lot of trouble in operation, which leads to more uptime and happy customers.
I previously mentioned rGuest Seat integration. We never got this to work as promised and got different answers from different resources when asked the same question.
Server sprawl began almost immediately. We went from a two server design to five in the end and still have occasional problems with kitchen printers.
