Frontline: Quick Resto at Outline 2015

    Last weekend on the territory of the Karacharovsky Mechanical Plant (KMZ), part of the buildings of which were decommissioned and surviving its last days, it was unusually bright and loud. Outline 2015, a two-day electronic music festival, was held in Moscow, a grandiose event bringing together eminent artists from around the globe and hosting 18,000 guests. This year, the festival shifted the format a bit towards the city picnic and organized a market for healthy food, a veg-cafe, installations and outdoor entertainment. Festival participants bought food and drinks at numerous points scattered across the vast territory of the site. They enjoyed high-quality electronic music and did not even suspect that the places of food were not simple tents and visiting cafes, but automated points of the latest technology.



    In two days it was necessary to automate the points that provide food and drinks to 18,000 people. Such an influx of visitors is a considerable burden even for stable tuned and tested equipment. The task was non-trivial:

    • bring and place equipment
    • deploy a system of automation of outlets in the field
    • required reporting in 1C in real time
    • The deadlines were as short as possible.

    Eyes are afraid, but hands do. We were sure that we could count on our cloud-based Quick Resto and it did not fail. For the festival, 33 ticket offices were deployed - for their uninterrupted operation, the standard equipment for Quick Resto was used (we already wrote about this in detail ):

    • 33 iPad tablets as user endpoints
    • three reliable Posiflex Aura 6900 thermal receipt printers
    • eight of our QR Box minicomputers for connecting peripherals
    • three Posiflex card readers (MR-2100U-3) and seven MSR213U readers

    The first difficulties arose precisely with the equipment. The customer purchased MSR213U card readers, which were not supported by our service by default. The problem was solved in 5 hours - we created a distribution for QR Box with support for this particular type of equipment.



    As you can see from the photographs, the infrastructure for deploying an automated cafe management system was not the best. There were many concerns related to network stability, voltage, even with the organization of the location and connection of tablet terminals. It was important to do everything not only quickly, but also in a stable, high-quality way so that there would be no troubles, starting from accidentally pulling out the cord and ending with problems with communication and electricity.





    During the two days of preparation and two days of the festival, the terminals were served by two administrators around the clock. Fortunately, serious force majeure did not happen, apart from the small power problems that still happened - everything was decided quickly and the network of terminals was restored.



    It is well known that enough time is required to adapt personnel to work with new software. In the situation with the festival this time was not. The employees of the power points appreciated the simplicity and comprehensibility of the Quick Resto interface - they worked on the tablet’s usual touch screen with clear graphic elements.



    The staff did not need to master the complex program menu and delve into the intricacies of the interface. The training took place half an hour before the start of the festival, because the staff had a lot of work: they arrived in two hours and were engaged in filling their bars. A three-minute express course was conducted at each point - this was enough to ensure that after a few minutes the work began to boil and did not stop for almost a minute.



    The menu of each point was previously entered into the Quick Resto system through the back office, its final update took place an hour before the festival opened. This technical moment played an important role for the quick start of work and super-fast service to visitors.





    But the most interesting case in the process of deploying our field automation was connected with 1C. The requirement of the customer was to upload all the data in real time. At first glance, nothing special from a technical point of view, however, the standard unloading in 1C is designed for 1C: Bookkeeping 3.0. And the customer had 1C: ERP 2.0, so I had to work on the fly. Unloading was developed in 1C and back to Quick Resto. To solve the problem, we implemented some functions.

    • Unloading and loading dishes and goods. For dishes, support for technological maps was implemented, it became possible to unload routings from Quick Resto to 1C in the form of components and load them back. Dishes can be unloaded immediately with prices. You can keep all price accounting in 1C, and then through processing update prices in Quick Resto.

    • Unloading and loading receipts. Now you can unload goods receipts from 1C and load other receipts (which were entered into Quick Resto) back.

    • Now you can unload the movement of goods in 1C from Quick Resto.

    • The ability to load sales in 1C by check was added. In standard unloading, sales were loaded immediately with the document “Retail Sales Report” (similar in the document “Cash Change” in Quick Resto). Now you can upload any check from Quick Resto to 1C. And on the check you can upload all the information: the amount of cash, the amount of cashless funds, the amount of customer bonuses, if he paid with a bonus card.

    Next, the 1C engineer on the customer side implemented support for the background job, since transferring each check to 1C took a lot of time, and this went against the wishes of the client. As tests showed, 12,000 checks were loaded for 3 hours - an impermissible luxury for such a mobile trade. The solution for working in the background made it possible to minimize the processing during loading and continue to work with 1C, while prior to the background solution 1C would stop the work while loading 12,000 checks. And such a simple one was unacceptable.



    Now it’s hard to remember what kind of music was - all efforts were focused on work. For our team, it was an absolutely unprecedented experience. What seemed almost impossible was done and our Quick Resto technology passed another test - it was our Outline. It was cool. But it will be even cooler.

    Great weekend to everyone!

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