Introduction
The Enterprise restaurant landscape is vastly different than the mom-and-pop store and small chain landscape. A true Enterprise grade point of sale system must meet requirements that are not easily or readily met with most commercial off the shelf (COTS) POS systems. Nimble, however, was designed to be Enterprise IT friendly. This white paper will outline many of the challenges Enterprise restaurant IT departments face and how Nimble helps to solve these issues.
Security
One of the chief concerns for any Enterprise IT department is security, especially when dealing with a point-of-sale system.
PCI/DSS
Unlike many current point-of-sale systems, Nimble does not have a built-in card processing system and is not intended to be a processor or gateway. Nimble does not store PCI data. The card processor is responsible for storing and processing all PCI data and tells the POS system if a payment has been made.
Database Model
The Nimble database model is available for review.
POS Security
Nimble supports multiple levels of security for users, both for the POS system itself and for the back-office management component.
Flexible Deployment Options
One of the challenges faced by Enterprise Restaurant IT departments is how best to deploy a point-of-sale system across multiple geographic areas with differences in internet speed, latency, and reliability. Many contemporary point-of-sale systems support a single deployment model, often times cloud based. Nimble was designed to be flexible and allow customers to choose whatever mix of deployment options makes sense for each store, while still maintaining supportability and roll-up data reporting.
On Premise servers
For stores with suspect internet options, or sites that want to ensure operational capability under shoddy internet, Nimble can be deployed with small on-site servers. Data from on-site servers are streamed in near real-time to a cloud-based repository for backup and reporting, allowing for real-time franchise reporting even with stores using a local server option.
Cloud Server
Many customers will opt to use the standard cloud server instance for their stores. The cloud system is comprised of a pool of resources that can dynamically adjust to customer workload changes to ensure high performance. Data in the cloud system is automatically backed up and data is passed to the reporting systems in near real-time for franchise roll-up reporting.
Private Cloud Instance
For customers who need more control or isolation of their systems, Nimble can be deployed using dedicated resources to a specific client. With the private cloud option, customer IT departments can ensure that their data and workload is fully isolated from other Nimble customers and workloads.
Customer Hosted Cloud Server
For customers who wish to take even more control of their point-of-sale system, Nimble can be deployed to a customer IT environment, using servers provided and maintained by the customer’s IT department.
Flexibility and Extensibility
Nimble is designed to be flexible and extensible. Unlike many other POS systems, Nimble was conceived as a hub to connect point-of-sale to other technologies from other companies. Nimble does not limit your organization to using specific accounting solutions, online ordering providers, payment processors, labor scheduling tools, reporting packages, or other third-party systems. Customers are free to use whatever best-of-breed technologies best fit their environment.
Nimble also has an open API that customer technology departments can leverage to create their own integrations. Coupled with an App store, customer technology groups can create their own suite of applications, integrations, and enhancements that can be sold to other companies via the app store or can be limited to just their own organization via private app-store deployment.
Customers looking for complete control over the client can even opt to create their own POS client on top of the Nimble API and data structures.
Version Control
Unlike many cloud-only POS vendors, Nimble customers using a mixture of on-premise, private cloud, or customer-hosted cloud options can let the customer’s IT department to manage and schedule system updates. This gives the customer time to test and validate a new version prior to going live, as well as time to update training and support material for the enhancements.
Private Data Lakes
For customers using private or customer-hosted cloud options, Nimble can provide private customer data lakes of the Nimble data, allowing the customer’s IT or data analytics departments to directly query and integrate the real-time reporting data aggregated from all of the customer Nimble locations in to the customer’s own reporting and analytics package.
Support Model
Enterprise support is different from small store support, with many mid-size and larger organizations preferring to provide their own tier 1 and 2 support internally instead of using the vendor’s support. Nimble has a support bundle that can be handed off to an enterprise support group that contains the same tier 1 support flows and information that is used internally to support Nimble. Additional training for customer tier 2 support agents is available as well, so customer technology groups can fully support their sites using internal resources.
As part of the flexible support model for Nimble, customers can also opt to purchase their own hardware from whatever sources they prefer instead of forcing purchases from a single vendor. This better fits in to many Enterprise support models that already have local support for their stores, either internally or via existing support / maintenance contracts with third party support vendors.