Welcome to PFU Systems Kiosk Team’s Blog!
More and more organizations are counting on self-service solutions to achieve their business goals. While successfully implemented kiosks give tremendous benefits to the organization - generate revenue, reduce costs and provide convenience to customers, it is no easy task to get there. Organizations deploying kiosks usually face a series of issues and challenges. Why?Part of the reason lies in the nature of a kiosk project. First, a kiosk project involves many stakeholders – multiple divisions in the organization, kiosk vendors, I/O vendors, software vendors, service providers, employees at the kiosk site and end-user customers. Second, there are a number of technical components – Kiosk hardware, I/O devices, software, middleware, remote management software, and the existing systems –have to be combined and integrated appropriately. Third, even after a successful deployment, technical and operational issues often arise. Ongoing efforts are required to make sure the kiosks are used and maintained in the way that they continuously benefit the customers and meet their goals.
Not many people have experience in every single aspect of a kiosk project. Also, there is no bible or survival guide that helps a project manager throughout a kiosk implementation. Nor is there a kiosk programming guide for a kiosk application developer.
What we are hoping to achieve in this blog is to provide useful tips that help project managers, kiosk application developers, kiosk operation manager and other kiosk stakeholders survive the entire kiosk project – from scoping to ongoing operation, and achieve the goal of the kiosk deployment.
These tips will come from our real-life kiosk experience. Although PFU Systems is relatively new in the U.S. market, our parent company, PFU Limited has been in the kiosk industry nearly two decades in Japan. PFU Limited has extensive experience in hardware design, development, manufacturing, software development, kiosk deployment, support and services. Through this blog, we will share the tips and best practices we learned from numerous kiosk projects we experienced both in Japan and in the U.S.
Before jumping into individual topics, over the next couple of weeks, we will post “Kiosk Quick Guides” that cover the following categories:
Kiosk Quick Guide
- Vo.1 – Kiosk Project
- Vo.2 – Kiosk Hardware Development
- Vo.3 – Kiosk Software Development
- Vo.4 – Kiosk Deployment
- Vo.5 – Kiosk Management
These will help you have a big picture of an entire kiosk implementation, and serve as a reminder of what to expect in the project.
We hope that this blog helps you succeed in your kiosk project. Please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn so that you will know when the new posts are up. Also, we are looking forward to getting your feedback and comments!
