Introduction

Running a diner franchise with locations in several large cities with busy populations known for dining out regularly is no small feat. These city dwellers and their demands for classic, homey dish, however, do present a conundrum: often the densest neighborhoods also have the highest ratio of diners to patrons. When people have an abundance of diner choices to pick from, getting a steady flow of customers, repeat visits or even just foot traffic becomes more of a challenge.

Optimizing in-store promotion and marketing is the one of the most effective solution to increase location visibility, brand familiarity and or selection; and such solution can be implemented by way of the intelligent electronic menu (or eMenu for short). A successfully deployed eMenu solution allows for multi-location real-time interconnectivity and simultaneous information push, visually and sometimes interactively.

Challenges / Requirements

A system integrator, upon receiving such eMenu request from an end customer, came to Lanner for a potential hardware solution. This franchised diner operator decided it was imperative to increase brand and store visibility against other local diners and restaurants chains. They wished to adapt a store-wide electronic menu system to enable in-store information push, digitally promoting not only brand awareness but also and more importantly, the latest/seasonal/holiday menu selections that usually come with greater margin and/or items that are currently in surplus and must be sold first and quickly.

The ideal solution, upon deployment completion, must

  • Be compact and fanless for installation and maintenance simplicity
  • Be capable of both wired or wireless network connections
  • Be flexible for peripheral device connectivity
  • Provide a visual and dynamic eMenu
  • Enable remote content management
  • Reduce operating costs
  • Increase marketing effectiveness and customer engagement
  • Maximize return visits


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Lanner Solution

Lanner’s LEC-7230L is a compact and fanless embedded IPC powered by the Intel® Celeron® Bay Trail SoC, a platform known for its significant improvement in computing performance and power efficiency. Benchmark testing conducted for computing performance and power efficiency found that the Bay Trail CPU (Intel® Celeron® J1900) outperforms its predecessor (Intel® Atom™ N2800) by 310% while maintaining the same level of power usage.

In addition to the powerful and nimble J1900 quad-core processors, the compact and fanless LEC-7230L supports up to 8GB of low-powered DDR3/L memory and comes with a multitude of I/O interface, including VGA (1600 x 1200), HDMI (1920 x 1080), dual GbE LAN ports, dual RS-232/422/485 serial ports, USB 3.0/2.0 ports and a mini-PCI-E slot with SIM card reader. The LEC-7230L is positioned as an all-in-one, one-for-all solution for a wide range of deployment scenarios that includes, but not limited to, production line automation, surveillance NVR, home gateway, digital signage, and retail POS.

Benefits

Designed partly for digital signage application scenarios, the LEC-7230L in this case is hooked up to multiple monitors at each diner location using both the HIMI and the VGA ports. Promotional and marketing information is securely and collectively managed, uploaded and transmitted via internet from the headquarter and subsequently pushed out to the monitors by way of the LEC-7230L installed at each diner location. Such setup delivers the following benefits:

  • Diner specialties are promoted visually and more convincingly through images and videos displayed
  • Seasonal/holiday menus are updated and maintained instantly without delays or paper waste
  • Up-selling is much easier as it directs customers’ attention to selections currently being promoted, minimizing information overload and maximizing the sales of items with higher profit margins
  • Obtaining feedback is much easier as sales history/records from each diner can be collected and analyzed almost in real-time.

Conclusion

The LEC-7230L is proven to add value to the said diner operator by enabling the implementation of electronic menu at each diner location. Administering each diner’s eMenu is made easier, more reliable and comparatively cost-effective. With The deployment of the LEC-7230L at each diner location, the franchise operator has enabled not only centralization for information push but also menu-focused up-selling.

By way this successful collaboration with Lanner, this retail system provider was able to offer a cost-effective approach to converged digital retailing seeing as most of the in-store applications can now be run locally on the LEC-2281 and securely managed remotely and centrally. This particular retail solution can now be found in several retail and restaurant store chains and is considered one of the industry-changing solutions for enabling the delivery of VoIP, digital signage, interactive kiosk, LAN/wifi, network security and in-store entertainment, all from one centrally managed, locally hosted appliance.

Featured Product


LEC-7230L

Compact Fanless Digital Signage IPC with Intel® Bay Trail CPU

CPU Intel® Celeron® J1900
Chipset SoC

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