IBS has won several new contracts to supply EPOS solutions for many of the UK’s best-known museums and tourist attractions, including Edinburgh Castle, the Museum of Scotland, London’s Science Museum and Westminster Abbey.
The latest prestigious contracts, awarded by specialist food service providers benugo, confirm the appeal of IBS’s versatile POSLink touchscreen technology to the museum sector, where several different hospitality offerings are often available to visitors within one attraction.
“Popular tourist attractions will normally require several different combinations of service under one roof. Yet they need one reliable solution to be able to accommodate and manage all the different operational styles, which can vary from self-service to cafe style, with fast service mode tills, to restaurants complete with table plan functionality,” said IBS’s managing director, Gareth Powell.
“Each museum and visitor attraction is unique and has its own specific requirements. Take the Science Museum, which has two million visitors every year. It has six different food and drink locations with each location offering a slightly different style of service. To accommodate each offering, we’ve created a ‘supersite’, which has six businesses within it.”
A key factor to winning the contracts is the ability to install new EPOS solutions within very tight overnight timeframes without disrupting trading.
“The Science Museum had a 13 hour window to remove the old EPOS solution at 6.00pm and then install and network our own solutions at six different locations before 7.00am the next morning.√Ǭ† Achieving this involves a high degree of teamwork with our colleagues at Benugo and several weeks intensive pre-planning involving site visits, pre-meetings, building all the hardware in advance, hot staging, testing and pre-labelling all the hardware to ensure everything was correctly assigned on the night,” said IBS’s senior project manager, Mark Bagnall.
“I have been working very closely with IBS over the past 18 months develop the capability of its system to closely integrate with our existing systems. These developments include the introduction of a biometric clocking-on system linked to our payroll software and tighter integration with our account’s systems,” said Richard Bull, IT Director for benugo. “These changes, along with existing operational and management functionality provided by IBS EPOS systems, give us an extremely powerful management tool.”
The museums and visitor attractions currently using IBS EPOS solutions include the London Science museum, V&A, Natural History Museum, Ashmoleam Museum (Oxford), Holburne Museum (Bath), Westminster Abbey, Bishopsgate Institute, British Film Institute and iMax Cinema.  Prestigious sites in Scotland include Edinburgh Castle (pictured above), Stirling Castle and the Museum of Scotland.