Tailored Approach

Steve Menary spoke with Tim Brown and Matthew Prosser of MICROS-Fidelio UK, to find out more about their POS offerings for the stadia and venue sectors.

The question ‘who is MICROS?’ is worth asking the next time you are paying for an item at a service till in a sports stadium or arena. Today, clubs can track fans’ spending patterns during their time at a sports events or venue to work out such factors as whether hot dogs are selling better than beef burgers or at what time fans’ complete most of their transactions. At the forefront of this revolution is MICROS, which is listed on NASDAQ (MCRS), and provides enterprise applications to the sports, hospitality and retail industries in more than 40 countries.

The global MICROS network is staffed by over 3,000 employees, and is comprised of 44 subsidiaries and 111 distributors around the world. It has installed more than 300,000 systems in hospitality venues around the world to date and has also provided POS (point-of-sale) solutions to a vast range of clients, from fast food chains to football stadiums. The company, which also works in the hotel sector, has been operating for more than three decades and grown to a US$950 million (GB£480 million) turnover business through organic expansion and a raft of acquisitions. The headquarters of MICROS Systems Inc., is in the United States, but the business operates globally, with MICROS-Fidelio UK operating out of offices in Slough, Berkshire.

MICROS-Fidelio’s sports venue installations total more than 250 globally. These range from over 500 terminals at a leading Premier League football stadium to ten terminals at one of the UK’s smaller racecourses. The company is increasingly penetrating the higher echelons of English football’s Premier League stadiums and provides hospitality management systems for some of the country’s top flight sides. Lower down the football league, MICROS-Fidelio also provides solutions to a number of England’s Football League clubs, including some ambitious teams looking for promotion to the Premier League this season.

MICROS-Fidelio also works with a number of the UK’s prestigious racecourses as part of an agreement to provide restaurant and inventory solutions, with one particular race meet seeing the implementation of between 70 and 80 POS terminals. In addition, the company provides POS solutions to large football grounds in Germany and Denmark, as well as to leading sports arenas in the United States and Australia.

Technological Revolution

MICROS-Fidelio UK — which is the division of the group that deals with Europe, Africa and the Middle East (or EAME for short) — caters for the company’s sporting clients, which have experienced a revolution at their turnstiles in recent years. Gone are the days when cash was used at the gates, with creaking old tills having been replaced with POS systems that solve problems like stock-taking, and even mean fans’ spending habits can be tracked and analysed.

The EAME team at MICROS-Fidelio is led by Tim Brown, Vice-President, MICROS Strategic Accounts EAME, who has been with the company for several years, and before that had even more experience in the hospitality industry.

Working for Tim is Matthew Prosser, Strategic Sales Manager EAME, also a long standing employee of MICROS-Fidelio UK. Mr Brown’s team has staff devoted solely to the sports and stadia markets, including a number of staff with experience from some of the company’s own clients.

Mr Brown advised: “We’ve brought on some of our team because they’ve worked at a couple of the biggest stadiums in the world and we try not to recruit outside of the environment we work in. Without their combined insight, we would not have been able to increase our product offering. They’re here to trouble-shoot not just new but existing customers, and those customers are finding that really helpful.”

He continued: “Below the main team members are a selection of trainers and installers, some of whom we have recruited specifically because of their stadium experience. As a result of that we get a lot of respect from our customers.”

Team Work

In 2006, the EAME division at MICROS was set up, with eight different vertical business streams, covering a wide range of clientele from sports to airports — where the company works for a number of big providers. There are also teams working with cafe clients, which include leading coffee chains; as well as teams working with large catering providers; and a QSR (Quick Service Restaurants) operation handles solutions for some of the world’s largest fast food chains all over Europe and the Middle East.

The company also has a Pubs-specific vertical team that works with leading pub chains and the TSR (Table Service Restaurant) division works across the EAME region with a number of large restaurant groups.

Tim Brown explained: “The aim behind setting up these teams was to create a team of people that were vertically responsible for the hospitality market as a whole, from fast-food outlets to sport and leisure venues.

“In each vertical team, there’s a representative from the sales, technical and product teams, someone from management, a consultant/trouble-shooter, and someone to handle the installation. There is also an account manager for after-sales support and a technical account manager to monitor calls that come in, and these two account managers work closely with each other. In the last eighteen months we’ve taken on twenty new stadia clients in EAME as a result of the teams we’ve now got in place.”

Sports Stadia Focus

Sports stadia are where Matthew Prosser is increasingly focusing, as the group looks to build on its existing successes and move into other sports, such as the two codes of rugby — union and league — along with cricket, tennis, and perhaps even increasingly popular minority sports like Motor Speedway.

Mr Prosser stressed that MICROSFidelio is also able to provide solutions for smaller sports clubs but wanted to use his company’s work at larger stadia as an exemplar: “Smaller clubs should not shy away from evaluating our solutions. All MICROS products are scaleable. We do have many blue chip customers but we understand that not everyone is in the top six of the Premier League.

“Our consulting team is made up of different people who have different skills from point-of-sale, to e-business and stock control systems. Each team brings knowledge that’s critical to a project. It’s a partnership — we don’t just treat customers as someone to sell to — we like to pride ourselves in building relationships, not just sitting in a room, us and them.

“What we’re trying to get away from is the ‘here’s your product, you deal with it’ attitude of some technology providers. That’s why we always invite customer comments and feedback.”

MICROS regularly attends focus groups and seminars to canvass the opinions of customers and this, combined with the input of the consultants, is used to enhance the product range, as Mr Prosser explained: “We design and manufacture our own hardware, so we have full autonomy over the price, and can change the design to reflect the needs of the customer. We can be quite nimble, offering bespoke solutions to our customers.”

Research & Development

About five per cent of the annual revenue of US$950m (GB£552m) at MICROS Systems is devoted to research and development to enable the company to keep up with the changing needs of its customers. This is not just software development, but studies of client needs — with one such study at one of the UK’s most prestigious stadium’s looking at the impact of the restaurant waiting staff not having handheld technology available to them. The study revealed that the average waiter in the stadium walked nearly four miles on match days, which involved taking orders from customers, returning those orders to the kitchen, and settling bills. With handheld technology (HHT), getting a drink at the stadium takes only about three minutes but without HHT a fan can wait as long as thirteen minutes, which is not only a loss of vital spending time but also a potential cause of dissatisfaction for the fans’.

Mr Prosser continued: “With stadia, it’s important to get the balance of service, speed of service, accuracy and control of cash right. If you don’t have enough detail, stock control won’t work, so we’re trying to provide a balance.”

With high staff turnover in parts of the stadia industry, specifically in the catering sector, there is also a need to provide solutions that need minimal training. MICROS provides easy to use HHT handsets with simple touch-screens using plain English.

The company also offers self-service kiosks to the stadia industry, having successfully developed the technology first through other sectors. The ultimate goal with self-service kiosks is to enable the fans’ to speed up their overall service, therefore allowing them more buying time, which adds to the venues’ bottom line.

Also supplied by MICROS are LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) boards. These not only provide displays to customers of what is on offer at a stadium but can also be used to change menus or discount food, so that prices can be changed and updated during a game.

Customer Trials Equals Satisfaction

All of this technology can appear overwhelming for some sports clubs, so MICROS offers trials to potential customers who are concerned about spending money on terminals that may only be used 25 or 30 times a year on match days.

Mr Prosser added: “With one customer trial, we saw that the kiosks were running out of product. Although this was seen as a negative at the time — due to the fact that more product was needed — it was also seen as a positive in the long run, as it meant that the stadium could sell more.”

Paul Farmer, Head of IT at Arsenal FC confirmed: "We required an EPOS solution that provided us with the flexibility and reliability to assure our hospitality business delivered on all levels of the business. From a partner perspective, we were looking to appoint a technology company with proven success in the stadium and arena marketplace and one who could support our requirements well into the future. MICROS offered the best solutions to each one of our needs."

In the Football League, clubs need reliable solutions that can be scaled back for less well attended matches, and that are flexible enough to service the individual management needs. At one ambitious championship club, MICROS installed 140 POS terminals, which did just this, as the club advised: “We needed to be able to make real-time decisions, based on accurate information, and the MICROS integrated solution offered us that functionality. MICROS has proven success in the stadium and arena marketplace, and can support our requirements well into the future.”

And from the horse racing sector, Paul Warren, Finance Director at Arena Leisure Catering, stated: “We required a reliable solution that can be easily deployed in a demanding hospitality environment. We selected MICROS for its ability to meet all our requirements and aid us in maximising our profitability.”

What the Future Holds

The needs of customers in the stadia sector is changing rapidly, and the team at MICROS-Fidelio expect these to accelerate over the next few years. At some stadia, such as the Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany, there has been no need for fans to bring cash for some time, and Matthew Prosser sees the advent of totally cashless stadia arriving sooner rather than later: “By the 2009/10 season, it will be with us in a big way.”

Mr Prosser also sees cashless stadia environments providing huge benefits for the industry in the future, with improved cash control and less opportunity for petty thieving. There will also be even more improvements in terms of the speed of service than already garnered with innovations such as HHT, while analysis of fans’ spending habits before, during, and after matches will be analysed much more easily with the deployment of cashless stadia solutions. This is not expected to be the end in the evolution of POS technology though. Mr Prosser expects technology in the future to be slimmed down and a complete suite of integrated applications, which MICROS already provides on the hospitality side, to be provided covering a variety of areas from inventories and labour to loss prevention.

In addition, Mr Prosser expects an increasing amount of self-service solutions, more LCD menu boards, cashless vending, and also cashless HHT used around individual stadiums, along with mobile concession carts.

Soon, there will be no need for the old routine of the ‘cashing up’ exercise at many sports stadia in the UK, as the advent of new technology provided by the likes of MICROS will mean that revenue and profit should soon be available almost instantly, at the simple press of a button.