EIT Digital's The Cash Register 4.0 Story
The Cash Register 4.0 (CR4.0) is an innovation activity, promoted by EIT Digital
Just imagine having a queue of customers waiting at the cashier in your brick-and-mortar store, and being able to deal with each transaction in just a few seconds, instead of minutes. How would you like that?
The Cash Register 4.0 (CR4.0) innovation activity, promoted by EIT Digital as part of the Digital Industry focus area portfolio, will allow merchants to do exactly that - and much more. The initiative is led and developed with the technology and know-how of the Italian company Olivetti and the support of the University of Helsinki and TIM.
Based on the Android operating system, and similar in look to a high-end computer or tablet, CR4.0 will offer to the merchant a single entry-point to manage many digital services and also backend operations. In Italy alone, there are around 1,3 million cash registers; almost 90% of this market, according to the company, could potentially be targeted by the Olivetti solution.
'Thanks to the integrated, Olivetti-branded, app store, the register will expand the options available to the retailers in three main fields: customer relations, mobile payments and internal processes automation,' said activity leader Marco Marchesi.
Say, for instance, a customer wants to pay with an M-Payment App: usually the merchant would have to accept the money via smartphone, but that is not always convenient, as the device could be unavailable, out of battery, or busy for a call. The Android-based machine get rids of all these issues. It will also support bitcoin payments, automatically transforming the virtual currency amount into its equivalent in euros.
in another possible scenario, a restaurant willing to accept orders from food delivery services should equip itself with a different device for each supplier and handle the process separately.
The Cash Register 4.0 will streamline operations, by providing a single touch point for all of these tasks. It could even communicate with the fridge, to check which products are in store, which need to be bought or automatically return and dispose of expired food.
'Some of these features, like the food waste one, will be available only in the long-term, but for others, like receiving an alert when a fridge is broken, or being informed of its content, things are moving fast forward,' Marchesi added.
From the register, a retailer could even control which music is played in the store by choosing, from a selection of playlists compiled by expert deejays, the one the best fits the overall look and feel of the business.
A "naked" version of CR4.0, with only the traditional cash register functions, will be launched in Italy and France during the first half of year, followed soon by the Olivetti App Store launch. In the second part of the year, fully fledged entry and mid-level models of the products will be launched across Europe.
Those model will include a series of pre-installed, must-have apps, but the App Store ecosystem will be open also to external, independent developers: to discover the best ideas and integrate the most exciting solutions, a series of hackatons is being organized in Italy and Finland, with a first date scheduled on 14-15 June in Milan.
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