Oracle Simphony POS Systems Reviews & Insights

I use Oracle Simphony as a POS solution in our three restaurants. The system should address several problems, but unfortunately has only created more for our team. In my opinion, the support is unknowledgeable about their own product and has to escalate every single ticket, resulting in tickets being open for weeks, months, and in our case years... yes years.

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.

Oracle Hospitality is the register system we use for the restaurants. We have 6 locations, plus 2 users at the office. We also have admin and IT users. It reports our sales and labor for each restaurant. It also pushes reports and data to our accounting software at the office.

The biggest issue I have with Oracle Hospitality is I cannot do custom reports. Peachworks was so easy and I could make a report for anything. I would prefer a report where it could break things down in one report per day, but if you pick a week, it is the total for week. I would like things available in the week by day. Also, if you want to pick another day, it takes 3 clicks to get to the new day. An arrow for next day or backward arrow for previous day would be so helpful.

This is going to be a rough review, as I am not a fan of Oracle or Oracle Hospitality/Micros. For reference, I am going to refer Oracle Hospitality as Micros in the review because that is what we know it as. There are many different flavors of Micros and the particular one we were/are using was RES 3700. You'll notice I said we were/are using. As a short back story, we switched from another point of sale (POS) software to Micros about 5 years ago at a single location and then deployed it to new locations as they opened except for this year we went back to the original POS we had before Micros. We ended up rolling back to our previous POS after having nothing but constant issues with Micros from the day we installed it 5 years ago at all (except 1) of our locations. I won't go into specifics but Micros just is not a good choice for our business type. It is fantastic for the foodservice industry but outside of that, I cannot recommend it for family entertainment centers at all.

To anyone in my industry, I would not recommend this to them. However, if they are just a restaurant or a bar, then, yes. I can recommend it. Micros is just a software version of an analog cash register. Its only purpose is to ring in items and take payments, that's it. And it does that very well. If you need Micros to interface with other software you're going to have a bad time. FECs should stay away but restaurants/bars should jump on it.

We use Micros 3700 as our sole POS for our 8 unit restaurant chain. We also use the back-end reporting (MyMicros) as a tool to analyze our company. The POS also includes a KDS unit, allowing our kitchen to receive orders electronically. Each restaurant has a minimum of 2 terminals, 1 KDS, 4 printers and an office server.

I think you need to decide what features you want vs. need and make absolutely certain you know what you're getting. This is true for any POS system, but since Micros charges for everything, you could think you're saving money up front only to pay it all back in the end.

We use Micros PoS for our location, and we use it for a multitude of things including payment, cash, credit card & gift card, and customization of the screens our servers and bartenders see and use on a daily basis.

Micros PoS is well suited for small business and large ones alike. The system can be customized to all different sizes and forms of businesses needing a PoS solution. It might be less appropriate for large scale business where quick and friendly customer service for help is needed.