Magazine Article | January 16, 2008
Increase Sales With Industry-Specific Kiosks

This integrator doubles its business every year by focusing on an unusual market.

Business Solutions, February 2008
Written by: Megan Burns
Government. Education. Healthcare. These are the vertical markets most integrators want to target. However, there is often an opportunity to increase profits by helping companies in uncommon industries streamline their operations. Transact Payment Systems Inc. focuses exclusively on one such industry — scrap metal recycling. While many consider scrap yards to be too harsh an environment for a POS (point of sale) system, Transact just completed a $150,000 project installing eight custom kiosks for a dealer in the Bronx.

The scrap metal recycling industry has some specific challenges integrators have to address. First, the dust in scrap yards is extremely fine, and it can be a major challenge keeping it out of equipment. Second, the industry does not follow a typical POS process. “This industry is more point of purchase than point of sale — it’s the process backward,” states Ken Gruber, president of Transact.

Transact recently was referred to a nonferrous scrap metal recycling dealer in the Bronx. The dealer wanted Transact to help streamline its purchase process because the process the company was using was manual and prone to tampering. Scrap peddlers would bring in scrap metal and have it weighed on scales at the receiving dock. The dealer then gave the peddler a handwritten ticket with the scrap weight on it. After unloading the scrap metal, the peddlers took their tickets to the cashier’s window to be paid. The dealer tried to devise elaborate schemes to keep the peddlers from changing the weights on the tickets.

Include Peripherals With Your POS Solution
After meeting with the scrap dealer, Transact developed a customized kiosk and offered a complete purchase process solution. Since its competitors could not offer a system that would withstand the harsh warehouse environment or address the payment issue, Transact won the project.

Working with cabinet manufacturer Qube Corp., Transact designed the most important part of the kiosk — a custom, dustproof cabinet that encloses all the POS hardware. The cabinet has a replaceable filter on the air inlet, and a fan maintains positive air pressure that prevents dust from infiltrating the kiosk from other openings. The heated kiosks use Elo 1739L rear-mount touch screens, a Dell PC, and a Star Micronics TUP900 receipt printer.

Based on its experience with the scrap metal recycling industry, Transact developed its own software, Scrap Dragon. This system provides the touch screen interface for the scrap buyer and the cashier. Scrap Dragon also integrates the ScanShell 800 driver’s license scanner and associated OCR (optical character recognition) software from Card Scanning Solutions.

With the new kiosks, when a peddler brings scrap metal to the receiving dock, the receiver uses the touch screen to select the commodities and grades being weighed. The kiosk prints out a receipt with the weight and amount to be paid on it for the peddler. “The dealer doesn’t have to worry about the tickets being changed now,” continues Gruber. “The receipt also allows the peddler to resolve any disputes before he leaves the receiving area.”

For the payment part of the process, Transact installed a MagTek IntelliStripe 380 encoder at the cashier’s window and a custom-programmed NCR P86 ATM machine in the lobby. Now instead of giving the peddlers cash, the cashier takes the printed receipt and, using a 16-digit encryption key, writes the data to the magnetic stripe on an ATM card. The peddler receives the card and uses it at the ATM machine to be paid.

Transact designed the software for the ATM and card encoder to increase the scrap dealer’s security. Once a card is encoded, it is valid for payment for one week. Each card is assigned a unique payment ID number, and once the ATM has made a payment from a card, it will not pay another card using the same ID number. If the card is lost or expired, it can be regenerated using the same information and ID number. “This system prevents a peddler from being paid twice for one purchase,” explains Gruber.

The new system has generated many benefits for the scrap dealer. Now, since all the data is gathered electronically and transmitted through the system, the dealer is not losing money on altered tickets. There is also an increase in security now that the cashier is no longer handling cash. Transact’s kiosks and payment system also eliminated the scrap dealer’s manual work reconciling all the transactions in its accounting system. As for Transact, its business continues to double every year as it focuses on this niche market.

www.https://tranact.com
www.starmicronics.com