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On the Mark Solutions (OTMS) has designed a custom interface  to be used at the California State University Long Beach for employee discounts on their Simphony POS system. The university was looking for a solution that would allow them to easily manage food and beverage discounts for their hundreds of employees receiving meal comps. As a university they have a lot of employee turnover, making sure the solution made it easy to activate and deactivate accounts as necessary was a key factor in the design. 

The solution that OTMS developed is based on a new implementation of the OTMS SIM File Service application used for these types of interfaces in RES and 9700. The interface service was rewritten in C# with the Microsoft .NET Framework as a Windows service supporting a custom SIM message handler to allow for validating account information.

Now, a POS operator can easily apply employee discounts via a touchscreen key where they are prompted to enter the employee number or scan their ID. The service reads a CSV file into memory to provide the lookup functionality without having to search the file for each operation. Updating the list of valid employees for discounts simply requires copying in a new CSV file and restarting the service.

This file based implementation is an old but reliable approach to interfaces that do not require extensive storage of transaction information or the display of detailed account information.  

The OTMS SIM File service can be licensed by third party developers who want to use the SIM programming language (SIM Programming Manual) built into Simphony to implement similar functionality.

Email sales@onthemarksolutions.net for custom development requests