Oracle Hospitality is the successor to MICROS eCommerce software, modular software dedicated to the needs of airlines, hotels and resports, sport venues, restaurants and bars, and others.
The MICROS Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems are available and now offered by Oracle since the acquisition of MICROS Systems in 2014, and are now part of the Oracle Hospitality Suite.
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TouchBistro
Score 6.0 out of 10
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TouchBistro is a complete mobile POS solution on the iPad for the restaurant industry. It allows users to manage reservations, view the menu, take orders and review sales reports with a few simple touches. Instead of servers repeatedly moving between customers and terminals for order management, servers can remain with customers and instantly submit orders to the kitchen and bar. Servers no longer need to write down an order and then enter it into a distant terminal. TouchBistro's single entry…
In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.
It's a tried and true system, over the years I have always had a great experience. Capturing sales is easy and it's extremely user friendly and easy to train staff on. While I have tried other systems and they have not been as easy or user friendly there are some more advanced technology and backend capabilities that TouchBistro could work on. Maybe just a little updating.
Support is awful. Oracle does not directly support end-users and depends on resellers to offer support. So if there is a bug or breaking change, we have to jump through hoops to get something fixed.
Does not play well with other software or interfaces. There are interfaces but they lack a serious amount of features that are crucial to our business.
The guest facing hardware does not hold up to constant use very well.
The backend hardware is lacking in PCI compliance and is not meant for enterprise use.
The software itself looks as if it is stuck in the early 2000s and there has been no sign of an update in many years.
Reporting is difficult to set up and use and you have to rely on third-party reporting to get decent usable reports.
One of my biggest (and only) issues with Touch Bistro is that it doesn’t integrate well with the credit card processing systems we use. Currently, we use Square and while the two systems do communicate, there are some instances, such as paying with gift cards, that take a few extra steps, which can be a pain when you have a long line of customers!
Because my credit card processing is separate from Touch Bistro there are a few things that are hard to track. Square does a great job of marketing and tracking the marketing, but it’s not accurate for me due to the fact that I use Touch Bistro as a POS and not Square.
I’d love for Touch Bistro to offer more marketing techniques that are easy to use.
It's an incredibly easy system to navigate both from a management perspective as well as a service member perspective.Training, programming items and inventory, day to day sales, processing payments, gathering reports and data, gift card sales and processing (with the exception of online for us) is easy and seamless.
First of all, I hardly ever need support for Touch Bistro, that’s how well it works. In the very instances over the years where I did need to call, customer support was easily accessible and fast and accurate with their responses
We've stayed with MICROS mainly due to that's how we've always operated and to switch operating POS systems would be a HUGE learning curve for everyone involved.
Harbortouch has a very robust POS system however it has issues that we do not seem to have with TouchBistro. One of the issues with Harbortouch is if the internet goes down, the credit card reader will not work and actually lock of the POS system causing extra customer wait times while their food is getting cold. TouchBistro's system will still capture the card info even when the internet is down and process it when the internet is working again
Micros has allowed us to leverage our margin by using our own credit processor and loyalty program. We've seen success from both of these platforms (not Micros) and have been able to save money on the extra costs of using Micros.
We could not find a case for the iPads that would also fit the third party card reader so we went without. This resulted in card readers breaking off in the charging port rendering the iPad useless.
Reports were available in real time, so it was extremely easy to see sales and make quick decisions.