The Harbor Group makes eating out in Santa Barbara a culinary adventure unique to this well-known seaside resort city. The Harbor Group operates four Santa Barbara restaurants as well as one in Ventura, each with its own flair and style. The Group's restaurants each offer a different concept: Harbor Restaurant is a 300-seat oceanfront fine dining venue, El Paseo - a Mexican restaurant nestled in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara; The Tee-Off, a cozy local favorite; and Longboards, a casual dining spot located on Santa Barbara's historic Stearns Wharf.

Situation

In 1999, when The Harbor Group was looking to replace a failing POS system at its seaside operations, the Group installed Revelation, the InfoGenesis POS solution, at the Harbor Restaurant and Longboards. The system proved to be a success and within a short time the management team had increased visibility into their daily operations. But the Harbor Group had no technology experts on staff and managing a high performance system demanded ongoing attention.

The Harbor wanted to get the most out of their system and when they were introduced to an Application Service Provider (ASP) POS option from InfoGenesis in June 2000, they started paying attention to a growing track record with this product. As the Group looked to install a new system at their Ventura property, Scotch & Sirloin, ASP offered the easy path. They decided to install e-Revelation in Scotch & Sirloin, and also replaced their relatively new, but highly problematic systems at their other units.

For the Harbor Group, the primary appeal of the ASP option was that they could take a centralized management approach to their entire operation, establishing a real-time view into all businesses from their management office in Santa Barbara. They envisioned a POS system with no servers or even manager workstations in the units, freeing managers up to focus strictly on the business operation. In addition, the capital outlay of buying a premium POS product across their operation challenged cash flow and represented a real obstacle. The choice was to live with failing systems, purchase low-quality alternatives that were useless as business tools, or to get what they needed.

The Harbor Group chose e-Revelation, the ASP POS solution from InfoGenesis, for the remaining three restaurants.

Finding the Right POS Solution

The Harbor Group operates as one large enterprise. Its five remote restaurants - each featuring a different theme, menu and clientele - are managed from the corporate office at the Harbor Restaurant.

"We offer a wide range of dining choices, so we needed a point-of-sale solution that could manage our operational diversity, as well as provide the means to help us take our operations to the next level," commented John Scott, Harbor Group owner. "We've watched InfoGenesis bring their ASP-based solution to market for over a year now. When we saw so many flawless ASP installations with some of the biggest names in the hospitality industry, we knew it could handle our needs."

InfoGenesis as an ASP offers individuals or enterprises access over the Internet to applications and related services that otherwise would have to be located on their own personal or enterprise computers. Users of all sizes can take advantage of the e-Revelation monthly fee plan to access applications, rather than investing thousands - or even millions - to create and maintain an IT infrastructure.

InfoGenesis hosts e-Revelation in its San Jose data center and maintains Internet-based connectivity to the various restaurant sites, processing all transactions as they occur from servers operating in the secure data center. There is no POS server to worry about in the restaurant and no back-office training required at the location. "We checked out information about the data center," said Perry, and quickly realized we had more powerful equipment and more extensive support resources than even the largest restaurant chain competitors that we face in the marketplace."

Business Solution

The Harbor Group point-of-sale solution includes POS terminals with receipt and kitchen printers in each restaurant. A manager PC workstation in one restaurant, The Harbor, is connected via the Internet to the data center. This workstation is used to manage the Revelation Configuration and Report modules. To ensure that critical business operations are uninterrupted, each POS terminal contains a client configuration to support continued operation in the event of connectivity or data center server failure. In addition, a kitchen printing service runs locally, assuring uninterrupted kitchen printing in the event of a connection failure.

e-Revelation also offers the Harbor Group consolidated reporting, centralized management of configuration and menu items, and real time availability of reporting data from anywhere in the world (including check-level detail of all transactions). The Harbor Group's restaurant managers are no longer burdened with the management of a back office system; e-Revelation frees them to focus on managing a hospitality operation. The entire management of the system health (data backups, database pruning, physical PC management, etc.) is placed in the hands of the POS Virtual Expert at InfoGenesis. The results: fewer customer support calls and greater satisfaction among the operations managers, since they are no longer forced to tinker with the systems in their offices.

A Look Toward the Future

As the Harbor Group looks to the future, it is apparent that the technology now in place will support the group's growth plans.

"e-Revelation will support the growth and changes in our operational needs, and we know that the InfoGenesis team will be there to support us as we change and grow," said Scott. "We are looking at aggressive expansion and now have the tool we need to support that objective."