MONKEY BUSINESS

This ain’t exactly Claridge’s. The Jumpy Monkey proprietors needed to find a cost-effective POS solution within their budget.

by Nancy Cohen


	Late last year, coffee roasting company owner Jeff Leinen stood in his retail coffee shop, Jumpy Monkey Coffee Roasting Company, in Sioux City, staring un-lovingly at his Samsung cash register. He wanted to replace the register with something more, say, caffeinated, to further strengthen the kinds of customer relationships that make or break the nation’s coffee houses, where good karma as much as good kahawa determines return visits.

BUSINESS SNAPSHOT

COMPANY: Jumpy Monkey Coffee Roasting Co.
HQS: Sioux City, Iowa
ENVIRONMENT
Retail coffee shop where customers buy the Total Coffee Experience, drinking primo coffee roasted in gas-fired drum roasters, with offers of enlightened options like “actual” extracts and Cinnamon Sticky Bun flavoring oils.

GOAL:
To ditch the Samsung cash register for a new, open, reliable, and affordable POS system that can drive customer perks like house debits and gift-card payments and which also can hook up to a database of sales–history data.

OPEN SOURCE SOLUTION:
Mandrake 8.2
L'ânePOS from Burrell Systems
http://burrellbizsys.com/products/lane-pos.html

SAVINGS
Buying a proprietary touch-screen POS system was going to cost nearly $4,000. Instead, the L’âne system from Burrell allowed the restaurant owner to use standard PC hardware and readily available POS components. He kept the project’s costs below $1,000 and came up rich with hardware, POS software, and all the source code required. He can modify it to adapt to his unique business needs

“My primary motivation was to provide Jumpy Monkey customers with a house debit or gift card payment option,” says Leinen. He knew a thing or two about point-of-sales systems and was interested in their extensibility to back-office needs. “I also wanted to provide our employees with an intuitive touch-screen interface, and provide a backend SQL database with sales history data for sales trend analysis.”

Goodness knows there are souped-up POS systems to choose from, able to provide a wide variety of integrating business functions, from keeping records of employee labor and attendance to managing table reservations. Problem was, at least in Leinen’s cost-conscious eyes, the POS systems out there were going to cost him. “When I started my search, it became obvious that the POS market is predominately proprietary in both hardware and software,” says Leinen. “Initial costs for a single register proprietary POS system could easily reach $4,000, well beyond our small-business budget.”

There was another reason Leinen wanted to avoid these systems. He could see the risk of ending up with “zero support” if any hardware purchased turned obsolete, which can be a big nightmare in the restaurant world. He said he decided he would not get a POS system until he found something open and reliable.

Wait a minute, what is a coffee guy doing talking in terms of proprietary, open, and reliable. Sounds like a computer guy. Truth is, while Leinen’s wife and her employees run the show, Leinen contributes to Jumpy Monkey primarily on the weekends, coming in to manage the books, keep the equipment working, and maintain a keen focus on products, quality, and costs. Leinen has been working in IT for 15 years dating back to work with a Commodore PET and a Timex Sinclair 1000. He's took on roles as programmer and analyst for a business called IBP, Inc where he designed, coded and deployed Unix-based material handling and data collection systems requiring predictable response times. He is now a Unix system administrator specializing in performance tuning and troubleshooting and is a seasoned user of Windows operating systems.

The latter evidently taught him something to avoid: “As an IT professional, I've had extensive experience with Microsoft Windows and Unix platforms including Linux. I didn't want my wife's customers or employees to suffer the same MS Windows experiences I had.”


	First off, Leinen turned to SourceForge.net to look for an Open Source project that sounded close to what he wanted. Leinen saw there were Open Source POS systems like Mercator, a POS application written in Java supporting quick-order restaurant environments; NOLA web-based software; the gShop application; and Retail Auto Auction which, like its name says, is for auto auction companies.

Bingo. Leinen found something especially relevant called L’âne POS. L'ânePOS is a point-of-sale (cash register) and backoffice program for retail businesses and restaurants written in Perl on Linux/Unix with PostgreSQL for backend storage. L'ânePOS was originally designed for retail stores, but restaurant functionality was subsequently added. The system allows any back-office computer to access the system for reporting or modification.

Although L'ânePOS does not require a Linux system, Leinen chose the Mandrake 8.2 distribution of Linux as his OS.

Why Mandrake?

“I selected the Mandrake distribution primarily because of the extra tools provided to manage your installed Linux system,” he says. “The Mandrake installation process is easy and user friendly. I appreciate DiskDrake, which allows easy manipulation of disks and file systems after the initial installation. Mandrake 8.2 was released with an improved journaled filesystem support, which I considered a plus for future reliability in the event of power failures.”

Ever mindful of what happens when a system crashes and the apron’ed baristas have 24 focaccia sandwiches and a United Nations of drinks to record, Leinen was also impressed with the fact that L’ane could offer commercial support. http://burrellbizsys.com/services/lane-support.html

That’s because the system is from an 11-year-old Illinois-based company called Burrell Business Systems. http://burrellbizsys.com/products/lane-pos.html Burrell offers Samsung register equipment; a thin client POS system specifically designed for the company various POS peripherals; and the free L'ânePOS Software. Besides, Leinen was heartened to see that Burrell's web site has many Open Source plug-ins available for its Open Source POS. One such plug-in allows for customer gift/house debit cards, which is just what he wanted. Leinen overall could not be more pleased: “L’ane works very well in my retail environment and supports a flexible configuration.” This is especially useful for the Jumping Monkey, which also has a web-based mail order business—this java doesn't download well.

For small-business owners searching for an affordable solution, he notes that L’âne can be easily configurable as a multiple register/central database or the database can exist on a single POS register, as he has done.

“I'm very happy that I have found a reliable option in a traditionally proprietary market,” he states.