Micros, Real Time Price Change?

[stagerman]

Hello,

A few clients have requested a 3rd party software program which modifies the price of items in real time.

Does Micros store item prices in cache? Is a system reboot required for price changes?

Any help is greatly appreciated,

Thank you

 

[michael2010]

Micros 3700, 9700, and e7 all update in real time. Real time can be a few seconds from when it is changed at the server/host PC until all the terminals pick up the change.

If you are looking to modify the price in a 3rd party software and pipe it into the Micros system that can be a lot trickier. I have seen it done in 3700 and 9700, but never e7 and I doubt that it could be done in e7.

To do it in 3700 and 9700 you would have to have some sort of export out of the 3rd party system and format it as SQL statements to pump into the 3700 or 9700.

 

[stagerman]

Very interesting, thank you for the help.

If e7 is capable of updating prices in real time, why do you think a 3rd party software won't be able to send price updates?

The software team has stated they can configure the prices to "send" in any format and any file type.

However, I'm assuming they will need to go through Micros to get certified.

What are your thoughts? Are you open to any paid consulting?

Thanks again.

 

[michael2010]

For 3700 and 9700 there is an actual database that you can pipe information into (or do some sort of import/export).

e7 is file based and I have not put information into it via any method other than the GUI. I suppose it could be possible, but probably not easy. e7 is also stripped down by design so it may an intentional feature gap.

I appreciate the offer, but I am not interested in any consulting at this time. It would get a little grey with my current terms of employment. Riffing in the forums with a little advice here and there is no problem though.

 

[MikeRose]

In order to update the pricing from a 3rd party app, you would need to send a file to the site and have some sort of scheduled task or atosequence that would read the file and make the appropriate changes. Quite easy actually. This way would require some setup on the server.

Another way that I have been using is throush SSIS packages. This way you can hit the remote SQL service and perform database taskes without anything loaded on the server. We currently harvest daily sales from 50 reataurants without any exports scripts on MICROS itself.

 

[Lex87]

This sounds a lot like what we do with gas prices on Logivision POS. I don't work with Micros but if it's gone file based it could be the same steps. If you're looking for paid consulting for Micros you could try this pos system site (there's some talk of them adding Micros and I think they are getting Micros certified so a small project might be very tempting?)

The Logivision system we use has always been file based and what we do is stop the polling to the tills and then make the price change in the GUI.

This creates the file for the price change. Analyze that file and it's easy to see what you need to do.

Once we got that far I just made a visual basic application that's a single window with a field to put the current supervisor password, and multiple fields for the gas prices. When the user posts a price change it creates the file in the outbox and the tills update.

Bingo, now the current supervisor can change gas prices on the fly from the tills, without back office access. As an added bonus I coded in sanity checks to avoid mistakes or cheating. So a cashier can't set the price of "92" octane gas to .32 instead of 3.2..

Hope that helps!

 

[pmegan]

You can also try Blue Moon Solutions -

http://www.gobluemoon.com.

They've been doing nothing but Micros custom work, interfaces and installations for over 10 years.

 

[DrZogg]

E7 updates prices almost immediately, much faster than the 40 seconds 3700 menu items seem to update as.
I think the money spent would be better used on paper rolls