One of the most important characteristics of a successful restaurant is the team’s ability to take orders, efficiently serve customers, and take payments. When the restaurant’s point-of-sale (POS) machine goes down, the restaurant not only loses important revenue, but also runs the risk of losing customers and brand loyalty.

VIGILIX, the only PCI-certified remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform built specifically for point-of-sale, was created with the ability to support nationwide restaurant chains – creating visibility and giving proactive support to ensure POS machines are running efficiently. One example of VIGILIX’s work with a large-scale restaurant chain is SONIC Drive-In.

The Challenge

SONIC Drive-In was experiencing a bottleneck with their POS machines, where the devices would frequently lock up during lunch and dinner rushes. They found that the only way to get the POS system to unlock was to reboot the entire system, which often took 10-15 minutes. 

SONIC Drive-In provides a bay-style experience for its customers, and each bay is connected to the same singular POS system. “If the system goes down, they can’t take orders from any bay,” said Colin Martin, General Manager at VIGILIX. “While the 10-15 minutes it took for them to restart the system may not seem significant, they could have taken 50-60 orders during that time alone.”

In the past decade, SONIC Drive-In has experienced rapid growth – with 3,500 open locations in 2021. Between their nationwide growth and the need to keep up with the influx of customers, SONIC Drive-In was looking for a robust solution that would allow them to do the following:

• Easily manage POS systems across multiple locations
• Provide system-wide reporting
• Develop a way to reduce employee errors
• Prevent system downtime
• Monitor mission-central POS hardware and software

The Solution

SONIC Drive-In didn’t know how to resolve their POS issue independently, so they called VIGILIX for support. The VIGILIX team got to work creating monitors through Sentry, our application that pro-actively monitors POS system hardware and software, to watch for certain POS activities and report our findings to SONIC Drive-In. From there, SONIC Drive-In took the data our team provided and plugged it into a business intelligence engine to identify the ongoing problem. It was determined that their POS systems had a specific older version of Norton antivirus installed. “Once they upgraded the antivirus software, the systems stopped locking up, and the downtime they experienced during rush hours went from very painful to zero,” Colin said.

The Result

While SONIC Drive-In may have eventually found the root of the problem, they wouldn’t have been able to tackle the issue in such a short time without the help of a VIGILIX partnership. VIGILIX continues to provide over 2,000 SONIC Drive-In restaurants throughout the US with situational alerting, remote monitoring, and reporting. All of these services offer insights that keep their locations up and running year-round.

About VIGILIX

For more than 15 years, VIGILIX has been delivering technologies to enable companies to succeed at remotely supporting the point-of-sale environment.

Our industry-specific technology detects service issues, initiates corrective actions, and alerts support managers to changing conditions immediately. Support teams, in turn, use our platform to access and control the POS systems from any location and any time safely and securely. Companies also use our platform to automatically back- up copies of their critical POS system data at our secure, PCI-compliant off-site data centers.

We are a privately held, entrepreneurial company that has grown organically without the pressures and influences of outside investors. We believe in this: to do the right things and do things right.