ActiveStore™: Bringing 'best of breed' to foodservice technology

The ActiveStore initiative is a collaboration among hospitality organizations, leading POS development firms, and Microsoft to provide a standard, robust system framework for developing retail POS applications. The initiative focuses on ensuring applications from different vendors can integrate and operate in harmony. For foodservice operators, this will mean lower long-term costs associated with installation and training.

Although ActiveStore began as a retail initiative, as in the past, foodservice POS systems will follow suit. ActiveStore will bridge the two separate but similar industries, reducing overall technology costs.

Underlying Technologies

Advancements are made every day in the technology showplace. ActiveStore is the child of the latest Microsoft strategy: COM and its derivatives such as OLE, ActiveX, DCOM and COM+. These technologies allow developers to create component-based software.

While it's not important to understand the inner workings of these base technologies, it is important to understand the concepts of what they do and how they do it.

COM (Component Object Model) provides a standard model for developing component objects. Basically, this model means that developers don't need to reinvent the wheel if the wheel already exists.

COM is analogous to an assembly line in a quick service environment. Imagine your task is to construct a breaded chicken sandwich. Your vendor handles the hard, specialized part of building the breaded chicken sandwich: supplying you with the breaded chicken breast. (In the ActiveStore world, an example could be a software vendor supplying a component to calculate your revenue forecast).  Another vendor provides the sandwich bread, freeing you from the labor-intensive task of baking the bread.  So, your job becomes similar to that of the software integrator, assembling the pieces to produce the final product.  In fact, ActiveStore provides a scripting language (think of it as a recipe writer) to customize what goes into your product and how you actually build your product. 

Now, imagine that you must decrease the food cost by 5% and you find another vendor supplying the same breaded chicken breast for $.05 less per pound. You can substitute an equally quality product with another without giving the consumer a new menu item. You can do the same with ActiveStore.

The other derivatives of COM; ActiveX, OLE, DCOM and COM+, provide additional functionality residing on top of COM to make components easier to develop. I'll spare you additional analogies regarding the COM derivatives.

What ActiveStore Means to You

ActiveStore will do two things for the foodservice environment: it will allow operators to buy systems that more easily integrate and it will provide a common user interface.

While you can integrate different products from numerous vendors now, it is often a laborious and expensive process. By providing a common framework for integrating systems, ActiveStore allows foodservice operators to select the 'best of breed' technology components from numerous vendors.

Another key selling point of Active Store is the common user interface. As development teams become more familiar with GUI interfaces and design issues, they are producing better, more functional applications. However, the look and feel significantly varies from each software vendor.

On the retail side of task-centric cashiers, ActiveStore eliminates the barriers between switching between applications. What the user sees on the terminal screen is the common ActiveStore interface.

Foodservice employees aren't as task-centric as retail cashiers, but to management's benefit, less time will be spent moving between applications. The server/cashier can focus on the ultimate goal, improving service.

What Active Store Means to Vendors

We can assert that the savings incurred by the foodservice side will be justifiable. But we also need to consider the cost ramifications apparent to the software vendors. Roughly 80% of software firms today operate in a chaotic state. This hectic environment can be attributed to numerous factors ranging from lack of detailed requirements/design to improper risk management.  The constantly changing technology forefront doesn't help the process.

However, ActiveStore can help the management of the software development lifecycle.

This technology will allow software development managers to fine tune their development models. There are many factors that affect the successful completion of a software product but one that is often overlooked is identifying and planning for possible unknowns ("risk management"); one of the underestimated factors is the incorporation of new technology.

Core Systems Services

In general, some pertinent items of concern entertain some common core services.   These services include components that provide automatic crash recovery, single-point security mechanism and system-wide event notification.

Core Under the Core

It's important to have a basic understanding of what applications exist in, under and around ActiveStore. Microsoft SQL server is the recommended SQL server. Another optional product is Microsoft transaction server. MTS is a repository for server-based applications. Implementing processor intense transactional-based applications on the server reduces the hardware requirements of the actual POS system and also frees up the POS to be more responsive. Microsoft Message Queue is a mechanism to send transactions from point A to point B and if desired, send to multiple computers. MSMQ is the base for ActiveStores's inter-application messaging.

Data Issues

The backbone and key to any system is its data. ActiveStore will limit shared data to common elements between applications.  This will require the development of a data bridge to support data elements that aren't classified as common.  ActiveStore has additional  "layers" of code before interfacing with the actual data, which could prove troublesome in a Quick service environment as each layer requires a slice of processor time.  Other technologies such as MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue) help at the transaction layer but may not be ideal in quick serve environment especially if transactions get held up in a queue. However, the advances in hardware should reduce or eliminate such concerns. What's neat about the Message Queue and its companion product; Transaction Server is that theoretically, transactions can be stored at the store server and automatically send to a main office if real-time sales data is needed.

Help system

ActiveStore states the help area is one of the strong points. In my opinion, this isn't something to list as a strong point, since it's expected.  However, there are some benefits to the help system, which will be HTML-based.

One feature that would benefit the industry would be to provide a training subsystem that would allow interaction and feedback; we'll call this hypothetical subsystem "ActiveTraining". It must also allow the user to start where they left off. Now, the real benefit would allow management to focus in on each trainee's weak spot to provide further training. The system should also recognize the trouble areas and for a specified time period, guide the user through these areas (via the scripting support) when live since the little extra time spent will still outweigh a mistake that frustrates both the customer and employee.   For example, during slow periods, the establishment requires the employee to work towards completing a training assignment.  In most cases, the user calls the help desk with the perceived expectation that this is the quickest way to solve their problem. Albeit the help may be context sensitive, it usually doesn't address semi-technical questions with an operational tone.

Conclusion

The ActiveStore initiative has definitely taken off with a good portion of POS development firms. There are over 50 firms committed to the development of the ActiveStore initiative.

Some retailers have already announced they will only implement ActiveStore compliant applications.  Currently, there is a release candidate 2; a fair indication that the first release will occur in the later part of 1999.  It is also fair to say that with the help of Microsoft backing, ActiveStore will become the de-facto standard for POS applications.  It would even make sense to ask your POS vendor about their involvement with ActiveStore and delay any major system purchases until the application has some ActiveStore compliant modules.

TRADEMARKS. PowerVision and We Make IT Happen are service marks of PowerVision Corporation.  Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Reprinted with permission from CF&Y's Foodservice Information Systems Report. CynterPubs Information Resources, www.cynterpubs.com or 800/833-5151.