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Case Study - Commercio Group

TCPOS Enhances Groups Management and Control

For almost 35 years Zurich has been the home of the family run chain ‘Commercio Unternehmungen’. Operating various types of hospitality outlets within the centre of Limmatstadt from the main railway station to the Stadelhofen station, ‘Commerico Unternehmungen’ is fully established in Zurich.

Today the group operates six restaurants as well as six theatre/cinema restaurants. All of the restaurants have their own distinctive style and architecture each offering an individual culinary delight in an uncomplicated Bistro style. The group began with the legendary 45 seat ‘Commercio’ Restaurant formally the ‘Commercio’ Bar. Over a short period the group grew with the addition of the 60 seat ‘Cantina’ Restaurant, 45 seat ‘Tina Bar’ and ‘Pepito Snack’.

1977 saw the opening of the Mediterranean style ‘Mère Catherine’ restaurant accommodating 120 customers over its two floors, along with bar ‘Le Philosophe’ and cinema ‘Movie 1 & 2’. Since 1980 the group has steadily grown with the addition of the 320 seat ‘Commihalle’ Restaurant, Cinemas ‘Nord-Süd’, ‘Alba’ and ‘Picadilly’, the ‘Bahnhof Stadelhofen’ Restaurant and, less than two months ago, the Café Bar ‘Annabelle’.

Now employing a total of 235 people – 160 directly involved in the day to day operations – and with turnover of 18 million Swiss Francs, the group is seeing continued growth in both their fine dinning establishments and their high footfall locations.

Left: A TCPOS Touch Screen Front End at the Restaurant 'Mère Catherine'. Providing operators with a fully customisable user friendly interface including a graphical table management interface as well as bill splitting, production center printing, unlimited popup layers and course modifiers.

As the group continued to grow and expand, the manual administration of its numerous outlets and collation of management data became evermore time consuming. The group set out in finding a suitable Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) solution; one that could meet the group’s current requirements and provide for future growth. It was paramount that the solution allowed the group to have central control and administration including up to date reporting for monitoring performance and management information.

The latest version of TCPOS, TCPOS.net from TCPOS AG was successfully highlighted and chosen as the group EPOS solution. With the implementation of TCPOS.net head office staff are now able to administer each individual outlet from one central source including master product data, pricing, promotions & discounts, and screen layouts, enabling them to ensure that there is a consistent standard across the entire estate. The ‘Commercio’ operational staff, thanks to the intuitive and easy to use TCPOS interface, were able to be trained and fully familiarised with the new system easily, without any impact on them providing customer service and focus.

Although the majority of the system is administered and controlled from the head office, at local level, through the implementation of ‘Data Visibility’ managers are able to connect to the central database and access data specific to their outlet allowing them to add specials, change local prices and run various management reports.

Corinne Sutter, ‘Commercio’ Project & Operations Manager, comments, “Since its implementation, the benefits of TCPOS are easy to see. Previously where managers had to manually collate sales and trading data and send it to the head office for consolidation, we’re now able access up to date reports at the click of a button. Likewise, administration of products has been made much simpler; products sold throughout the estate just need to be added once, along with promotions or discounts and even till configurations all of which are then seamlessly applied across all outlets.”

Right: Project & Operations Manager, Corinne Sutter, “Commercio", and Michael Schiesser, Services Manager, TCPOS AG

In total TCPOS AG installed 20 TCPOS Front End Point of Sale (POS) terminals and all associated hardware including networked kitchen printers, eliminating the need for trouble-prone print servers. Each of the TCPOS Front Ends is permanently ‘On-Line’ to the central database at the head office via broadband. In the unlikely event of a failure with the broadband connection, the tills continue to function fully ‘Off-Line’ in a ‘Peer-to-Peer’ mode. All data is stored locally and as soon as the connection between the TCPOS Front End and the central database is restored, all data is asynchronously transmitted in the background and written to the central database. The TCPOS Front End will automatically switch back to operating ‘On-Line’ without the need for any operator intervention.

‘Commercio’ Director, Nicolas von Graffenried, commented, “We’re incredibly pleased with the system, and the professional reliable service received from TCPOS AG throughout the implementation. The successful co-operation of TCPOS AG has been paramount in ensuring that the rollout was carried out without any impact on our operation and, more importantly, on our customers.

TCPOS.net now enables us to quickly and easily monitor our business across the whole group. Previously we would have monthly operational meetings with all the managers to discuss performance and highlight any potential problems, now we can spot potential problems and take the necessary actions. TCPOS.net gives us the information we require, when required, allowing managers to concentrate on running and driving the business.”

Commercio Unternehmungen Zürich
Nägelihof 1
Tel. 044/250 59 80
Fax 044/250 59 81
Internet: www.commercio.ch

TCPOS AG Information
TCPOS was founded in Switzerland in 1994, wholly owned by TCPOS AG, originally developed for the Swiss and Italian hospitality market; now European wide with presence in Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Portugal and the United Kingdom. More than 3,000 installations totaling over 15,000 point of sale terminals servicing: - Fine Dinning Restaurants, Bars, Cafés, Canteens, Fast Food Outlets who’s customers include UBS, Costa Cruises, Deutsche Bahn, Autogrill and Daimler Chrysler.
Internet: www.tcpos.com

TCPOS.net was installed by TCPOS AG of Switzerland. Mirific Services Ltd in Salisbury is a UK Business Partner of TCPOS AG.

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