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PM-POS is a Point of Sale system developed to solve operational issues of retails, restaurants or similar businesses. Here are some details about issues PM-POS project primarily started to resolve.
Point of Sale systems stores data to allow managers to track history of the business. Generally it is limited to financial, inventory or cost data. Recent developments on areas such as Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence allows optimization of business operations better than we do by just observing reports. So collecting every significant data about business & operations are becoming more important. Other than staff generated data, data generated by customer apps, online services or IoT devices should also be stored. Developing a generic transaction format needed to store everything happens in the business environment.
Data generated by local PM-POS instances is stored on a transaction history tree called as "Local Ledger". One of the primary objectives of PM-POS project is integrating business operations to other branches of franchises. Also being able to partially integrate local ledgers to systems used by suppliers or apps used by consumers is also needed. We should be able to exchange data between local ledgers by using a public blockchain as the data transfer medium. We call it "Exchange Chain". We'll start a separate blockchain project for building the exchange chain.
Blockchain based solutions will have an important role in the future of retail and services industries. PM-POS should allow merchants to seamlessly integrate their local ledgers to any blockchain solution they want to use.
Data generated by multiple local ledgers should be able to consolidate on a single database to allow reporting, data mining or AI solutions.
When we have multiple terminals on a retail environment, real time communication between these terminals is essential. For this reason a stable local network or Internet connection infrastructure is an important requirement. In practice having a stable network connection is not always possible. Especially while using mobile terminals, operator may walk out of wireless coverage and temporary network connection breaks may lead to serious issues. PM-POS solves such issues by using distributed application development principles for terminal communication. PM-POS terminals works primarily offline without depending on a remote server access and syncs with other terminals through the local P2P network when the network connection is available. We're using CRDT (conflict free replicated data types) technology to achieve this.
A Point of Sale system enforces some business rules to improve operations. If these rules are hardcoded in the software managers won't be able to apply their specific business ideas to optimize their operations. All business rules or operational workflows defined in the POS application should be customizable to implement business specific needs.
Managers could be able to configure separate business rule sets, operate them as long as they want and compare results. Also rule sets and related configurations can also be easily switchable depending on specific conditions.