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Vue Entertainment

"The J2 560 looks good, it's quiet and it adds to the cinema goers' experience by involving them..."
Roland Jones, Vue Entertainment's IT Director

The Client
Vue Entertainment is one of the UK’s leading multiplex developers and prides itself on operating state-of-the-art venues. Formed in 2003, it now has 58 cinemas with a total of 568 screens and 125,911 seats. This scale of operation, together with the 32 million customers that Vue has every year, make it the UK’s largest operator of modern multiplex cinemas.

Vue also leads the London market and has the second largest market share in terms of UK box office.

The Solution
The Challenge
The Vue mission is to be the best in the business. Apart from building a new culture within the company, Vue has concentrated on upgrading and increasing its infrastructure to consistently provide the most enjoyable cinema experience.

The motivation for moving to J2 Retail Systems came when Vue decided to rationalise and replace all existing hardware to coincide with the deployment of a new estate-wide software application for ticketing and concessions. Today, both its concessions and its cinemas with box offices are running J2’s latest touchscreen models, the 15” 550 and its 12” equivalent, the 520.

The Benefits
• An exceptional combination of low cost of ownership and functionality

• A single family of EPoS hardware across the estate has made for flexibility and economy

• Vue can now sell tickets from both its cinema box offices and its confectionery and food concession counters

• The system is fast and intuitive to use, which helps to deliver a responsive service and keep queues short

• The option to pole-mount the touchscreens enables them to be turned to invite customers to select their seats

• The J2 550’s fanless construction makes for silent counter operation

• The machine’s good looks and small footprint are very much at home in the contemporary setting of Vue cinemas.

The Process
Vue undertook a lengthy product search and evaluation. Its goal was to find a family of machines that could be used across its cinema estate and moved as required to make for maximum flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Performance and reliability were also key factors. Roland Jones comments: “In an environment such as ours, reliability at point-ofsale is absolutely critical. There is no margin for downtime when you have a queue of customers waiting to buy tickets in a tight timeframe.”

Vue was keen to remove the dependency upon box offices and enable tickets to be sold from confectionery and food concession counters. Its choice was also influenced by the need for flexibly-mounted touchscreens which could swivel to face the customer for seat selection.

The Results
The new 550 ticked all the boxes on the Vue’s wish list and demonstrated the role it could play in creating a positive point-of-sale experience for all concerned.

The 550’s built-in mounting options gave Vue the choice of desk- or pole-mounting, and chimed with the company’s desire to present a contemporary image. Being a fanless machine, the 550 also represented exceptional reliability as well as silent operation. Finally, price-competitiveness combined with J2’s trademark 3-year return-to-bench warrantyconvinced Vue of the solution’s reduced costof ownership.

Roland Jones continues: “I don’t think we could have achieved the 550’s low cost of ownership with the same functionality from another provider.”

Looking Forward
Today, Vue can boast the most modern and highest-quality cinema infrastructure in the market. 90% of its cinemas have stadium seating and are equipped with the latest projection and audiovisual equipment.

By offering a great customer experience built on exceptional service and supported by the best technology including at point-of-sale, Vue hopes to grow its business and the UK cinema market as a whole.

Vue remains committed to building and developing the best and most modern multiplex cinemas in Europe and plans to open 10 new sites in the next couple of years.

About J2 Retail Systems

J2 Retail Systems is a specialist manufacturer of PC-based touchscreens, LCD touchscreen monitors and point-of-sale hardware to the retail, hospitality and leisure industries. With 50,000+ units installed worldwide, its clients
include Vue Entertainment, Greggs and Thresher Group.

By controlling its own design and manufacture, J2 has built a reputation for innovation, reliability and cost-effectiveness. Credited with introducing ‘thin client’ EPoS to the market, J2 uses emergent technologies wherever possible to reduce the cost of hardware ownership.

Sales in the UK, Continental Europe and the Middle East are managed from the company’s Warrington headquarters. J2 Retail Systems Inc. in California covers the USA, Canada and South American markets.

J2 550
The J2 550 represents leading-edge technology at price-points previously unobtainable for the most demanding point-of-sale, point-of-service, and point-of-information device markets. Its sleek and elegant design provides an ultra-compact footprint of only 8” by 9”, freeing up valuable counter space.

The versatile J2 550 offers a choice of configuration. As a ‘thin client’ for Microsoft Embedded Operating Systems such as CE .NET and XPe, all unnecessary moving parts such as fans and disk drives are eliminated to increase reliability. Alternatively, a hard disk drive can be added to work as a ‘thick client’ in environments such as XP
and Windows 2000.

Sector: Entertainment