Intriguing Applications Digital menus feed restaurant sales

Digital menu boards communicate valuable information to customers so that busy employees can take and fill orders and prepare meals. These displays are some of the most enthusiastic and helpful agents behind the fast food counter, actively promoting high-profit menu items, and encouraging add-on purchases. They’re bright, engaging, and keep customers entertained while they’re waiting in line. Driven by software, promotions start and stop automatically, are tied to the time of day or seasonal availability, and include local events and tastes.

WAND Corporation integrates its quick service restaurant (QSR) digital menu boards with POS terminals, tracking transaction data in order to correlate sales to marketing programs. Armed with this data and using remote management technology from Intel, WAND can quickly and easily modify—and customize—the displays and POS systems in hundreds of restaurants with the simple push of a button.

Why it’s a game changer

The all-digital QSR is a much more versatile operation than today’s typical fast-food franchise. Restaurants can respond more quickly to customer trends, inventory availability and competitive activity, almost on the fly.

Customized changes can be made restaurant-by-restaurant, hour-by-hour if desired. Want to honor a local school or sporting event by temporarily renaming a specific entrée? Need to remove a food item that is no longer available? Want to lower prices to compete more effectively with a local outlet? Remote technology makes it possible to change anything quickly and easily.

It takes a small team to develop, distribute, and install new in-store promotional materials to thousands of stores simultaneously. Fewer on-site visits result in fewer costs to the QSR as well.

Materials can be pulled from a customer’s advertising campaign so that in-store displays better reflect what customers are seeing in their homes. Video-enabled digital menu boards are networked to the restaurant POS registers that record every customer purchase, helping companies determine the effectiveness of their marketing programs. And because both systems are remotely managed and controlled, the data can be delivered to QSR’s quickly and easily.

What’s so intelligent about it?

Integrated merchandising and operations with remotely managed hardware and software is a first for QSR’s. Everything is connected: in-store displays, digital menu boards, POS terminals, plus outdoor digital menu boards. It enables QSR’s to track customer sales data and correlate it to marketing programs with market analytics software. And because it’s connected with Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT)¹, the data can be reported and analyzed almost in real time.

Key technologies

Using a powerful dual-core Intel® processor and the Intel® Q45 Express Chipset, WAND employs integrated Intel® AMT to provide remote control, management, and distribution of promotional content to the digital signage systems and POS terminals deployed in QSR’s. Intel AMT also enables remote diagnosis and maintenance of the hardware and software systems, updating the BIOS, upgrading the software, turning the sign on and off—all from headquarters.

WAND uses a high-performance Intel® platform to power the display/menu systems, the POS terminals, and the back-room servers that network the two. Processor performance is key to powering the high-definition video used in the digital displays, and Intel offers a number of embedded chips that deliver the optimum combination of graphics and video processing at the lowest possible thermal output.