TD Garden
2
Case study | TD Garden
Imagine the challenge of providing excellent
customer service to 18,000-19,000 event
visitors anxious to make a purchase at
concession stands and quickly return to their
venue seats. No one wants to miss out on the
live experience.
That’s the situation for the concessions sta
at TD Garden in Boston at every live event,
whether it’s a sporting event, a major concert
or other performance. To keep pace with
an enthusiastic and fast-moving crowd, TD
Garden needs a reliable point-of-sale (POS)
system with the exibility to add supplemental
point-of-sale stations on any given night.
TD Gardens is a large entertainment venue
with over 250 POS terminals so to win at
this game, they decided to deploy Vivonet’s
cloud-based POS application on the HP MX10
Retail Solution, based on the HP ElitePad with
Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry Pro Retail.
“My motto when it comes to the Vivonet and
HP solution is, ‘It just works…,” says Jim Riva,
IT manager, enterprise applications, POS and
retail for TD Garden.
Expansion, exibility,
mobility
POS hasn’t always been such a slam-dunk for
TD Garden.
“When we were using a traditional POS system
with proprietary software and hardware ,
we couldn’t get replacements for the POS
workstations. And as we were preparing
to renovate the concessions operation,
we realized we couldn’t expand,” explains
Jessica Segal, assistant general manager for
Sportservice at TD Garden.
Among the benets: The Vivonet POS
software-as-a-service solution eliminates
the need for an onsite infrastructure of
servers at TD Garden and provides enterprise
management capabilities which help reduce
the management burden on the IT sta,
according to Riva. It also gives TD Garden a
high-availability solution with the exibility to
add additional point-of-sale terminals anytime
with the addition of a simple, low-cost HP
MX10 Retail Solution with the ElitePad.
“The HP Retail Solution with the ElitePad is
much easier to add and manage than the
proprietary hardware used in our old POS
system,” notes Segal.
Mobility transforming
service
It was the second stage of the POS transition
at TD Garden that showcased the strengths
of HP MX10 Retail Solutions with ElitePad
tablets. On any given night, TD Garden deploys
somewhere between 25-60 mobile concession
points—typically selling popular beverages.
These freestanding concessions stations
generate a tremendous sales volume.
“The portable concession stands had a
cashbox and a portable credit card reader
working on a 3G cellular connection,” recalls
Riva. “The card readers were slow, It all had to
be logged by hand.”
Now, the freestanding concession stands are
equipped with the HP MX10 Retail Solution.
This compact 3-in-1 solution transforms an
ElitePad into a powerful POS tool with the
HP Retail Jacket and the HP Retail Expansion
Dock.
Once the tablet is placed in the Retail Jacket,
users gain the exibility of being mobile with
the built-in functionalities of a magnetic
stripe reader (MSR) and barcode scanner.
Once the mobile solution is paired with the
HP Expansion Dock, concession workers have
the functionality of a traditional POS solution
with the ability to connect to a full suite of POS
peripherals.
“The ElitePads are lightweight and easy to
carry. The screen is a good size, but not so big
that the tablets take up a lot of space,” says
Segal.
They are also very durable. Working in the
midst of a mobile crowd – especially during
breaks in the action— sta can drop things,
fans can knock over a drink or condiment.
The HP Retail Solution stands up to that kind
of heavy usage much better than previous
systems. “If the portable credit card machines
we had used for freestanding transactions
were knocked to the oor, they wouldn’t hold
up,” recalls Segal. “The HP Retail Solution can
take the demanding routine in this business
and keep working.”
The combination of the Vivonet POS
application and the HP MX10 Retail Solution
simplies the work of a concessionaire to
speed transactions. “Before, users would
have to do the math manually. Now, the Retail