Ease of Use

We believe that two key challenges in deploying a successful POS solution are:

• obtaining flight attendant ‘buy in’. This will only happen if the flight attendants like the handheld and the POS application, have confidence in it and think that it makes their job more straightforward;

• minimising the end user training requirement. Even if it is practical to take cabin crews out of their day to day roles to participate in class room training it is expensive and inconvenient.

As a result ‘ease of use’ has been designed into SkyShopper™ from its very first version in 2002; the objective has been to make the handheld terminals ‘as easy to use as an ATM’. For example:

• helptext is available at the touch of a button on every screen, guiding the flight attendant through their transaction;

• SkyShopper™ is multilingual, allowing each flight attendant to operate the handheld in the language in which they are most comfortable;

• SkyShopper™ provides pre-built functionality for all of in-flight retail, duty free and food and beverage sales within one menu structure, minimising the learning curve;

• touchscreens and Windows ‘look and feel’ provide a user interface familiar to any PC user;
• SkyShopper™ is configured for your airline prior to rollout (see below), ensuring that the flight attendant is working with familiar branding, terms and concepts;

• Interactive web base training is available, allowing users to review their knowledge at any time and to gain familiarity with new functions.

As a result we enjoy excellent flight attendant ‘buy in’ and training costs are minimised.

 

Flexibility

SkyShopper™ is parameterized and highly configurable, allowing us to tailor the system to mirror your required work practices, not vice versa. For example, by simply changing parameters in the MTServer back office system you can configure SkyShopper™ to choose whether or not:

•     an opening stock check is mandatory;

•     to accept vouchers for payment;

•     to accept multiple currencies, and if so which ones;

•     to operate ‘cashless’;

•     to print a receipt for every sale automatically, or only on request, or only when the order exceeds a specific value;

•     to enable ‘on screen’ product selection where barcode scanning is enabled.

As above, the system is also easily tailored to accommodate your airline’s branding, colour schemes, fonts and descriptive terms –in short an individualized solution for your airline but with the benefits of a stable, generic processing platform.

 

Reporting and Analysis

SkyShopper™ provides a comprehensive suite of web based reports, which are accessed via the internet using a standard web browser. New analysis reports can be easily written and existing reports can be modified. All reports can be saved as PDFs (Adobe Acrobat) or exported to Microsoft Excel, and individual users can have their own access rights individually defined.

In addition to sales analysis reporting, SkyShopper™ also provides excellent discrepancy and control reporting, allowing problems to be identified and resolved and losses to be minimised.