Chowly, headquartered in Chicago, integrates 3rd party online ordering apps with restaurant POS applications, providing a consistent ordering system.
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Oracle Hospitality - MICROS POS
Score 1.0 out of 10
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Oracle Hospitality is the successor to MICROS eCommerce software, modular software dedicated to the needs of airlines, hotels and resports, sport venues, restaurants and bars, and others.
The MICROS Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems are available and now offered by Oracle since the acquisition of MICROS Systems in 2014, and are now part of the Oracle Hospitality Suite.
I would not recommend Chowly to any restaurant that is trying to push orders through to their POS from a third party delivery site. Any restaurant would be much better off finding a third party site that integrates directly with their POS. Using Chowly was more of a headache than it needed to be and our company switched to Checkmate (also not great) after a year with Chowly.
In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.
Support is awful. Oracle does not directly support end-users and depends on resellers to offer support. So if there is a bug or breaking change, we have to jump through hoops to get something fixed.
Does not play well with other software or interfaces. There are interfaces but they lack a serious amount of features that are crucial to our business.
The guest facing hardware does not hold up to constant use very well.
The backend hardware is lacking in PCI compliance and is not meant for enterprise use.
The software itself looks as if it is stuck in the early 2000s and there has been no sign of an update in many years.
Reporting is difficult to set up and use and you have to rely on third-party reporting to get decent usable reports.
Chowly was not as good as Checkmate, though I cannot in good faith recommend either. We ended up switching over to Checkmate after a year with Chowly due to our dissatisfaction with the service.
We've stayed with MICROS mainly due to that's how we've always operated and to switch operating POS systems would be a HUGE learning curve for everyone involved.
Micros has allowed us to leverage our margin by using our own credit processor and loyalty program. We've seen success from both of these platforms (not Micros) and have been able to save money on the extra costs of using Micros.