Restaurant chain TGI Fridays is to equip its servers with Dell Venue mTablet E-Series mobile POS devices, enabling them to quickly serve customers, process orders and payments while at tables.

Working in collaboration with Microsoft, TGI Fridays will provide eight-inch devices that use the new Fridays Service Style technology and run on Windows 8.1, Microsoft’s latest operating system.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on giving our guests the best experience possible, particularly in their interactions with our people,” said Tripp Sessions, vice president and CIO of TGI Fridays. “Windows 8 gave us a platform that allowed us to develop a new user interface, which gives our servers even better tools to delight our guests and make their experience even more enjoyable.”

Running on Oracle’s Micros Restaurant Enterprise Solution (RES) 5.4, the devices will improve server-customer interaction, reduces table wait times and regulates the pace of the orders sent to the kitchen.

Oracle’s Micros RES 5.4 also enables TGI Fridays to manage the various aspects of running a restaurant, from tableside ordering to traffic and queue management.

“TGI Fridays is rethinking how technology can lead to restaurant innovation,” said Tracy Issel, general manager of Worldwide Retail, Consumer Goods, Hospitality and Travel for Microsoft. “We are helping it change the way food orders are processed and wait staff and managers do their jobs, reinventing the customer experience, one restaurant at a time.”

TGI Fridays has already completed a six-city pilot in the US cities of Texas and Minnesota and plans to deploy the tablets in 80 additional restaurants. In total, the company will provide staff with more than 2,000 tablets by March.

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