Using the TYPO3 framework, Marketing Factory Consulting GmbH planned and built the CMS for a point-of-sale terminal (POS terminal) meant to be set up in Aral gas stations recommending lubricants, lamps, windshield wipers and care products for all common makes of cars. This is the first project that Marketing Factory Consulting GmbH realized for Aral AG.
In Germany, Aral is the first company to set up a POS terminal at a gas station. The objective of the terminal is to enhance the gas station’s service competence, which often suffers from a lack of qualified staff to give competent recommendations. With the terminal and its information on brands, models and years of manufacture customers can easily find the product they are looking for on their own. In order to constantly improve the software we can create various user statistics.
For this project we installed six extensions in TYPO3, with four of those being created by Marketing Factory exclusively for this project. A special challenge was that all the product data was imported from an Excel sheet and had to be assigned to different car types. Therefore an interface was built which enables the import of product data on a regular basis. To have the best possible user experience with a very low response time, a special focus was put on developing a caching strategy on the POS Terminal. Usually these terminals are only used for HTML, Flash and video content, not for high performance systems like a CMS.
All software and content changes are centralized in just one TYPO3 installation. To distribute changes to all terminals, a copy of the TYPO3 installation and all cached pages can be exported from the CMS to an external server. Via UMTS the update can be distributed to the client’s test terminal for approval first and afterwards to all existing terminals in Aral gas stations.
