Point-of-sale rollout automation

Context

Before moving into development at IntelliPOS I worked in rollout and support: installing, configuring and commissioning Aloha point-of-sale systems in restaurants and hotels, one at a time.

The problem

Every installation was the same manual procedure repeated: same configurations, same database scripts, same mistakes. And every mistake was solved from scratch again, because nobody had written down how it was solved last time. The bottleneck was not technical: the knowledge lived in the head of whoever did the install.

What I did

• Identifying which parts of the procedure were identical across every installation
• Tools and scripts that run the repetitive part with no intervention
• Automation of the database queries and adjustments previously done by hand
• Documenting frequent incidents and their fixes, so they stopped being investigated twice

Outcome

Installation, configuration and incident resolution times cut by a factor of ten. Still to be published: number of installations and hours saved per month.

Stack