Hands-on Solutions

 

Tar Heel Capital of Boone, North Carolina, is one of the country’s largest Wendy’s restaurant franchise owners. Like similar establishments, Wendy’s had a policy requiring managers at all stores to approve voids and transaction changes. Managers also needed to approve bank or credit card transactions when two transactions with the same card occurred in quick succession. This rule was aimed mainly at protecting against “double swiping,” in which sales staff can ring an unauthorized charge without customer’s knowledge after ringing the legitimate charge for which the customer has handed over the card.

 

Managers would approve a transaction by swiping their own card through the terminal. But the company’s managers had magnetic swipe cards that could not be directly tied to each manager, which made the policies hard to enforce. Cards were easily misused because they were left lying around by managers or because they were stolen or intentionally shared. The company was also spending considerable sums replacing lost cards, each of which cost about $1 without shipping.

Tar Heel Capital wanted to address these issues. It also sought a way of better monitoring and enforcing time and attendance among its 2,800 employees.

 

Rob Ireland, Tar Heel Capital’s IT director, had been hearing about how some similar businesses had been alleviating such problems with biometric solutions. Ireland also says that the company had recently brought on a new top-level executive who had expressed interest in biometrics. Nonetheless, he began looking into the issue with a degree of skepticism, because he thought that any solution would be too costly and complex.

 

After some initial research, he concluded that fingerprint scanners would be least costly. He looked at some point-of-sale (POS) terminals with built-in scanners, but he found that replacing the company’s terminals would be too expensive. Fingerprint solutions that could plug into terminals via USB would be far less expensive overall.

 

A technology vendor that Ireland had worked with suggested a plug-in solution called U. are U. from Redwood City, California-based DigitalPersona. One initial DigitalPersona advantage was that authentication could occur merely by having a user place a finger on a reader, Ireland says.

 

Ireland decided to order several of the readers so that he could test their performance and user-friendliness in one restaurant. In addition to the readers, the system required that Ireland install DigitalPersona software. He says that simply required that he insert a disk into the restaurant’s back-end server; once running, the program automatically installed drivers into the POS terminals. After rebooting the terminals, Ireland was able to do enrollment, which he says was relatively simple, requiring a few finger swipes of a couple of fingers.

 

Ireland says that after conducting a little online research, he was able to find the readers priced for approximately $100 each; the software came free with the readers, he says.

 

Quick acceptance. Ireland obtained company approval to purchase the devices and decided to start with an initial rollout of about 40 units total at about 10 of Tar Heel’s approximately 75 restaurants. A slightly larger rollout would follow, with an eventual goal of integrating the units into almost all of Tar Heel’s restaurants.

 

Once a store was converted, Ireland knew the old cards would no longer function. His backup plan if he encountered any serious problems with the fingerprint system was that he could convert a restaurant’s authentication system to keypad entry. Ireland says he was confident he could revert to such a method without too much difficulty as the company had used a keypad system a handful of years before it adopted the card authentication method. It would be relatively simple to deactivate the card system to the previous method, he says.

 

Ireland began by calling managers to describe the project; most seemed supportive, he says. He then mailed out units to different stores on a rolling basis. He asked managers to set aside about 20 minutes to speak by phone after the readers arrived.

 

During calls, he could remotely view the restaurants’ POS terminals. After booting the software, he asked managers to attach the readers and reboot the machines. He then helped them enroll their prints.

 

 While managers were enrolled remotely, Ireland went on location to stores to help enroll staff. Some employees expressed privacy concerns. He says concerns may have been reduced because the company had recently completed an effort to remove Social Security numbers from restaurant databases. The initiative may have given the company some credibility, Ireland says. Staff seemed more concerned about the Social Security numbers than they did about the fingerprint biometric data, he says.

 

Ireland says he tried to have each restaurant keep at least one spare unit securely in the back as a replacement. All terminals generally aren’t used at once, he says; it is also relatively simple to move readers among terminals.

Since installing units in most of Tar Heel’s Wendy’s, one or two readers have stopped working, but the vendor has sent replacements, Ireland says. In a few cases, some legacy terminals didn’t function with the new product, he says, but those machines were old and are being replaced.

 

He encountered few installation-related technological problems. One minor issue occurred in the beginning when readers were attached before the software was running; some machines required a reboot.

 

Ireland says he was half-amused when, during installations, the most common question managers asked was “If I’m not around, can I lend someone my card?” But managers quickly adapted, he says. “Most people just thought the technology was cool.”

 

Results. Ireland likes the new system and appreciates not having to continually replace cards. The number of voids has decreased noticeably, he says. Food costs have also fallen compared to sales. With the readers, “you know the manager was actually there.” Ireland estimates that the solutions will pay for themselves “in about six months.”

 

The Wendy’s restaurants, like Club Fitness, are part of a small but growing group of companies that might not have considered biometrics a few years ago. They both say they are glad they did.

John Wagley is an associate editor at Security Management.