Montreal-based Lightspeed Commerce Inc., a cloud-based POS and e-commerce software provider, has rolled out two product updates improving workflow automation in Canada's hospitality and retail industry.

The company’s Mobile Tap offering lets Quebec restaurant operators accept tap and credit card payments directly on an iPhone as part of the Lightspeed Tableside POS system. 

For restaurant operators in the province, Mobile Tap allows for a better customer experience and a smoother and faster checkout at the end of a meal, thereby improving the overall workflow in a restaurant.

“The specific innovation here is you do not need additional hardware,” said John Shapiro, chief product and technology officer in an interview with TechNX. “It works directly on an iPhone, so it's a mobile tap for the iPhone. So instead of having to take an additional card reader to a table, or asking the patrons to come to the front to pay, now you don’t have to juggle multiple devices. The restaurant staff is simply able to have the patrons pay directly at their table.”

The solution also is attractive to restaurants as it is simple to use, supports additional functionality for payments including card inserts, swipe, and tap payments, along with split-check functionality, integrated tipping and multilingual payment flows.

“It is a very seamless, easy way to get up and running, as you can use a support iPhone to get started,” Shapiro added.

Improve workflows, better retail margins

Improving workflows is behind Lightspeed’s introduction of an AI-powered automation tool for retailers. The solution uses optical character recognition (OCR) combined with AI to pull product details from packaging invoices, packing slips, including SKUs, quantities, pricing and variants, directly into a draft purchase order within the retailer’s Lightspeed Retail POS system.

Lightspeed said combining OCR with AI lessens the need for employees in a retail environment to manually enter each line item into the POS system, thereby reducing the chances of errors that can lead to duplicate product entries, mismatched SKUs, pricing errors and inaccurate stock counts that impact margins and customer experience.

“Inventory is one of those areas in retail store operations that remains super manual,” Shapiro added. “You have packing slips, purchase orders, invoices that show up that you then need to make sure are correct and entered into your system.

"It is a huge pain for retailers and their workflows.”

Manual input is time consuming

He said it is not uncommon for retailers to have boxes of items in back rooms that have not been inputted into the retailer's POS and inventory system because of the time it takes to do so manually. 

“That is literally dollars that are sitting there and not flowing through your business,” Shapiro said. 

Lightspeed's AI-powered optical character recognition tools now lets a retailer’s staff use an iPhone or Android device to scan the product information on those boxes and automatically send that information to the store’s inventory and POS system.

“We have had customers of ours describe that manual entry of that information can take between three and 20 hours a week,” he said. “So automating that can eliminate a substantial amount of that time. And what is most attractive about this, is the staff and retail can use any iPhone or Android device. There is no additional hardware to buy.”