Open Air Events gets one step ahead with Lolly for summer

As the festival season approaches, the Lolly Smart portable till comes into its own

About Open Air Events
Open Air Events provides bars to events and festivals around the UK - from small family-run events, to large scale concerts catering for up to 60,000 people. The company launched three years ago, and has almost doubled in size year on year.

‍Working with Lolly (Lolly Smart)
‍The team at Open Air Events has always invested in their own infrastructure, which includes having their own portable tills to take along to the various events. In late 2017, Open Air Events purchased 10 Lolly Smart tills. Michael Limming, director at Open Air Events, says: "The event season runs from May to October, so at end of last year, we made the decision to buy our own terminals - knowing we would have them for the events and that we could programme them to be compatible with the bars. We knew we had to get one step ahead, in anticipation of the busy time ahead."

‍Support levels - The Lolly Smart
‍The Lolly Smart provides a compact touchscreen till that has its own inbuilt receipt printer so it doesn’t take up a lot of counter space. It also has an inbuilt battery which is useful for portability, or if an electric supply fails - you can continue trading for up to seven hours. The till comes with an SD card which acts as a secure back-up. And it is installed with Lolly EPoS software, which is super intuitive and easy to use. It is matched with a range of add-ons such as portable card machine, bar code scanner, cash drawer, additional printer, a card scanner, and LollyHQ cloud back office. Michael Limming adds: "The battery life, ease of use and lightweight nature of the Smart makes it the dream till for these types of event. It's great to have our own tills available to use, and when we need more we can hire them in from Lolly - to boost what we already have. The tills are easily programmable, which means we can upload details to a memory stick and have as many tills up and running in a really fast timeframe, which helps where we go from one event and immediately to another. And the fact that they are so intuitive and easy to use was a huge selling point for us. We have all our own trained staff, but should we need to bring in anyone new, we can show them how to operate the till in less than 10 minutes."

The team at Lolly provided training from the outset, highlighting the various functions to help Open Air Events maximise the till's usage. Michael Limming adds: "They are also always at the end of the phone if we have any queries."Speed of service is key during festivals and events, given the high customer volumes". Michael Limming advises that this is what Open Air Events sells itself upon - 'an event bar specialist geared up to delivering high volumes.' He adds: "Having our own trained staff and equipment means we have designed our proposition to perfectly suit. And we could not do that without the support from Lolly".

‍Peter Moore, CEO of Lolly, comments: "Open Air Events is a business that is going places, and we are delighted to be on that journey with them. The Lolly Smart will come into its own this summer, and the tills we have provided will support the very many events the company will be attending up and down the country. It's also reassuring for the customer to know that if any of these events experience power surges of electrical issues, the tills can continue operating with the battery supply. Here's to an exciting, busy and prosperous summer of trading ahead!"