Case Study: 'Revelation' A Sure Thing For Casino

The 80,000-square-foot riverboat casino, owned by Mandalay, offers 1,100 slot machines and 37 Las Vegas-style table games. The InfoGenesis installation, which manages all food, beverage and retail transactions on the riverboat and its land-based operation, replaced an existing POS system.

The Grand Victoria Riverboat Casino also has two full-scale restaurants and an informal buffet and deli.

InfoGenesis installed 24 IBM SurePOS 500 touch-screen terminals running its Revelation POS software to manage the operations.

"When you've got a gaming resort setting like this, you've got a wide spectrum of outlets to deal with,fine dining, quick-service restaurants, and everything from Starbucks to bars and nightclub-type atmospheres," said Scott Martiny, vice president of sales and marketing for InfoGenesis, based here. "That's something that really tests the products from a technology capability and integration standpoint."

The InfoGenesis team provided interfaces to the riverboat's Acres Gaming player tracking system and Berg beverage-pouring system to provide a totally integrated solution, Martiny said.

Anthony Gustafson, MIS director for the Grand Victoria, said InfoGenesis' ability to integrate the new POS solution successfully with the riverboat's player tracking system was a key factor in its decision to use the technology. Revelation's solid architecture also gives Grand Victoria a competitive edge by supporting "self-comping" at the riverboat's food and retail outlets, he said. Self-comping allows Grand Victoria guests to redeem player comp dollars for food, beverages and other amenities directly at the point of sale.

Revelation's design is scalable and open, which will allow for additional integration and support for complementary property management technologies used by the Grand Victoria, Gustafson said.

The system was built from the ground up for the Microsoft Windows NT platform. It offers NT-specific capabilities such as support for multithreaded applications, built-in security and RAID. Terminal requests to the server are multithreaded and can be distributed to multiple servers. Also, the POS data file update can be isolated from any impact upon live system performance.

The Revelation POS server runs on either Windows NT Server or Windows NT Workstation, depending on an operation's size and transaction volume. Those factors also determine whether Microsoft SQL Server or Access is used as the relational database for configuration and reporting. Revelation supports protocols such as TCP/IP, Ethernet, token ring and radio frequency.

Other features of Revelation include the ability to split, combine and transfer checks; an option for displaying up to 16 menus per terminal per meal period; team serving that allows sharing of sales and tips; and server, cashier and management reporting. Check settlement features include automatic currency conversions, predefined quick-cash keys and multiple tax structures.

While the InfoGenesis solution is sometimes priced up to 50 percent higher than those offered by some competitors, Martiny said InfoGenesis' customers pay for its ability to provide a highly integrated POS solution for a targeted market,weaving everything together so it works seamlessly with existing systems.

"Anytime you are in this kind of environment and there's a major grand opening or renovation, there's always a lot of risk," Martiny said. "POS is a mission-critical application. There's no 'Oops, we didn't get it right.' "