How Bizerba has halved its costs for terminal connection

The customer

Bizerba supplies integrated system solutions for weighing, slicing and labelling technology for the retail, trade, industry and logistics sectors. When it comes to industrial weighing and labelling technology, the company with around 4,500 employees is one of the world’s leading specialists.

Besides the actual scales, labelling systems and slicing machines, Bizerba also provides hardware, software and services relating to the entire payment process – regardless of whether customers need to connect POS terminals and cash register scanners or integrate web shops.

The challenge

As a comprehensive solutions provider, Bizerba also helps its customers from retail, trade, industry and logistics with all aspects of their sales process. Connecting POS terminals to the scales or the corresponding cash register system is an important basic requirement particularly for butchers, bakeries and small shops.

«The situation is often the same: our customers don’t ask which POS terminal providers our system is compatible with. It’s always the other way around: they just go to their bank – and ask about its terminal solutions. Then our solutions have to be compatible with these terminals», says Marius Kostezka, Global Product Manager Retail at Bizerba, describing the fundamental challenge the company had to overcome.

To enable its customers to connect different payment systems to the PC scales, Bizerba developed the RetailApp «PaymentManager». In this context, they were looking for a universal interface for POS terminal connection for all terminal types in the DACH and Benelux region – the core markets for this application.

The solution

Bizerba had already come across treibauf’s Pepper integration solution in 2021. This universal connection between the POS terminal and cash register simplifies the connection of over 100 different terminal types. That’s because it supports over 90% of the communication protocols used in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

With Pepper, Bizerba can offer its customers convenient connection of almost any terminal in these core markets – without having to incur significant costs for development and integration itself.

«Thanks to Pepper, our response to the question of whether a specific terminal is compatible with our cash register system is almost always: absolutely – namely without incurring a lot of extra costs for the integration», adds Marius Kostezka, summarising the role of the universal interface.

Due to customer requirements, Bizerba installs the interface as Pepper Library directly on customers’ scales.

The result

«The most significant benefit of Pepper is massively reduced costs for implementation: if we take care of terminal integration for a customer, the whole process per terminal with Pepper only takes us around half as long on average! So we can take care of a larger customer base more quickly», reports Marius Kostezka, Global Product Manager Retail at Bizerba.