QSR Dynamic Menu Boards – Data Integration
Following on from last week’s blog describing one of the Proof of Concepts we have at Signagelive, this week we wanted to share a second Proof of Concept we have had around for a little while, and although we do have a couple of customers using a version of this Live, we have not moved it on as a product as we would love to hear your feedback.
The Proof of Concept was the start of the Food Service Manager, and the basis for it being created was to provide a simple and easy to use User Interface for Quick Service Restaurants, or Cafes and Bars to update prices of Products in real time and also include Allergy information, which may change at short notice.
This User Interface then links to Digital Menu Boards which dynamically update with these price or allergy changes, without the need for manual intervention.
The Digital Menu Boards are the really interesting part of this Proof of Concept, as they show a possible data integration point which Signagelive can work with you to achieve.
These menu boards are HTML5 and use Knockout.js to bind data to the HTML5, which is read from a data source using jQuery Ajax calls. In this scenario an API hosted by Signagelive, but there is no reason why this API could not be one of your own.
The way these Menu Boards are designed means that if the data is updated, it does not require a full refresh of the content, so there will be no blank screen while the whole menu board reloads, the data just updates inside of the page in an instant, so the viewer would probably not even notice it happening.
Although this is a hosted API it does not have to be hosted in the Cloud, externally from your internal networks, and the same is true for the HTML5 content.
Signagelive Players connect to the Cloud for the content configuration, but this does not mean the actual content has to come from the Cloud, it could easily be an Asset which is available internally within your Network and therefore restricted by your own security protocols.
If you have a POS (Point of Sale) system which you would like to use to produce Digital Menu Boards then why not talk to us, the POS System does not have to be the point of contact for the Menu Boards to retrieve their data from, we could produce a solution which retrieves or receives the data from the POS and amalgamates it into a dataset which can then be used to populate your Menu Boards.
This type of Data Integration does not have to be only Menu Boards, it could be any data from your POS system, or your internal systems such as Salesforce to display internal communications, like current Sales figures against targets, newly won deals or breakdown of sales per region.
If you would like more information please contact sales@signagelive.com.
