OPEN SOURCE RINGS THE TILLS AT BURGER KING FRANCHISES

Since being established in 1954, Burger King has become one of the leading fast food retailers across the world. Today the chain has more than 11,100 restaurants in 65 countries worldwide and prides itself on providing a range of locally tailored food, from the "Kofta King" in the Middle East to the "Green Tea Pie" in Thailand.

With the onus being on providing their products in the shortest amount of time to the customer, there is naturally a high consideration given to the IT systems and POS products employed in each Burger King restaurant. For this reason, Burger King in Norway has chosen to standardise on a range of high performance hardware products provided by the Norwegian distributor, Lexit Group.

Burger King in Norway is owned by the highly successful Umoe Catering AS whose restaurant portfolio also boasts names such as Peppe's Pizza, FattigMann and La Baguette. Umoe Catering AS is Norway's leading chain of service establishments with an annual turnover of NOK 1.5 billion and a staff of 3,200 divided between some 159 restaurants and cafés.

Lexit Group, working alongside their reseller, PC Express, have provided all of the 28 Burger King outlets throughout Norway with a highly reliable, robust and, most importantly, high speed range of POS hardware to ensure that they can respond to their ever increasing throughput of customers. As well as incorporating the highly popular Gladius terminal from Firich, the solution from Lexit Group includes the leading POS printer from Star Micronics, the TSP700 series.

The TSP700 printer is a high speed, high quality, single station thermal printer which offers the customers advanced features such as the ability to print barcodes, tickets and labels and also produce coupons based on user-defined customer purchases. This is achieved through the unique AutoLogo™ feature which enables instant promotional campaigns to be produced without having to pay for expensive software modifications.
Terje Holte of Umoe Catering immediately saw the benefits of incorporating the TSP700 from Star into the Burger King solution stating; "The TSP700 clearly offers a consistent and highly reliable performance and has a proven track record in high volume applications. In a busy restaurant environment we were looking for a printer which would give us high speed, unrivalled output with no downtime and that is what we have found in the TSP700 printer."

The Burger King system, which runs on JavaPOS, has been installed in all of the restaurants in Norway which all run 3-8 POS terminals and in total over 100 systems have been provided. This includes installation into the most northerly Burger King restaurant in the world in the town of Tromso.
The fact that Lexit Group play such a key role in the integration and installation of the systems was also a key factor in the decision by Umoe Catering to place the business with Lexit and PC Express. Lexit Group pride themselves on providing the customer local supplier support and service, guaranteed stock and fast maintenance. Working very closely with PC Express and Umoe Catering, Lexit were able to offer the end user the Gladius terminals with a pre-installed image, guaranteeing ease of integration and minimal set up times. This, combined with the unbeatable performance of the TSP700 from Star, has meant that Umoe Catering and Burger King have a POS system that will take their growing business well into the future.

Background Information on Star Micronics
Founded in 1947, Star Micronics is one of the world's largest printer manufacturers and has facilities for worldwide production, marketing and support. Employing over 2500 staff and achieving turnover in excess of £250 million, Star Micronics has developed a POS printer portfolio that spans thermal and dot matrix printers and mechanisms, designed for barcode, ticketing, receipts and labelling. Star's proven technology is also being utilised to develop reader/writer systems for visual, smart and magnetic stripe cards and to install print mechanisms in multimedia kiosk environments. The Star Micronics' range is available internationally via a distribution channel comprising distributors and dealers.

For further information contact:

Annette Tarlton or Claire Smith
Star Micronics EMEA
Tel: + 44 (0) 1494 471111
Email: Marketing@Star-EMEA.com