I'll guess I'll weigh in with our experiences with MS RMS. We use it at 7 retail locations currently and have a test store set up as well.
Our usage would be akin to Radio Shack. We do a lot of catalogue sales so we try to capture customer information at purchase time so we can send them our catalogue later. As a result, we have quite a large customer DB.
Our biggest problems are the following:
1. Customer lookup is too slow and not flexible. Type in a name, wait 15 - 20 seconds all while the customer is tapping foot. There's no option to search on cust name + street or cust name + city.
We did three things.
- We had a dev write an app that allows searches to be done on lastname + zipcode.
- We segmented our customer data to the store's local area, reducing the size of the DB by 75+% (from about 2 gigs to 300 - 500 megs).
- We upgraded all the sites to SQL Server personal, which made a huge difference in performance.
2. It runs on Windows. This is a blessing and a curse, as you might imagine. On the upside, much of the general support and maintenance can be done by your existing IT staff and you're not paying through the nose to a vendor. On the downside, it is always a battle with store staff and managers. During slow periods your store staff will try every way they can think of to surf the net on your POS machine, or customize the desktop, or do something. The end result is a failed PC in a remote location.
Obviously, the reliability of the POS machine is a priority for anyone experienced in this field but I mentioned it since I expect a lot of very small retail operations might jump on the bandwagon due to the relative familiarity of Windows.
3. General reliability. We get a constant stream of complaints from store managers that they have to reboot the PC a couple times a day because RMS totally locks up. We've spec'd out machines that are more than adequate for the RMS software and DB so we know that's not the problem. They also report slowness, hitching, etc. which may or may not be a real problem (some people will never be satisfied with the speed of a computer).
