Most of us utilise EPOS services on a daily basis and yet most of us won't even know what an EPOS system is
. EPOS stands for electronic point of sale and even now there are probably people who are not sure what an electronic point of sale is. Basically it is a checkout machine that you use in a shop.
You can quite come to understand how vitally important these machines are and how vital it is to have appropriate levels of backup for these systems, time is money and if one of these systems failed companies can quite quickly start losing revenue.
There are a number of firms out there that provide EPOS services to some of the largest organisations within the United Kingdom. Technology never stands still in any sector and that is certainly the case in the EPOS services sector with tills advancing at an astonishing rate of knots. Over the last decade we have gone from fairly standard tills, to electronic touch screen operated tills to self service touch screen tills. It really has been a challenge for the Information Technology firms and companies that provide support to a whole host of supermarkets and shops around the country to keep up with all of these changes.
The latest incarnation of the electronic point of sale system, is the self service till which allows customer to scan and pack their own items. Basically this system is a very clever EPOS services computer system which also stores a database. This database contains a number of key fields, firstly it references the barcode against the product and price and displays these variables on the screen for the user to confirm or deny. Once this stage is complete the item scanned is then placed into the storage area which consists of a weighing scale. If the item that is placed in the packaging zone doesn't match the weight of the product scanned in the computers database the system will report an error.
This helps to ensure that the customers can't pull a crafty move and not scan an item so they don't pay for it. Obviously items that haven't been scanned will set the door alarms off. It is amazing to see how far EPOS services have come over the last few years and it makes you wonder where we will be in ten years time. I'm not sure but it is certainly going to be exciting to find out.