Original cash drawer maker builds on technology

With over 200,000 square feet of manufacturing and distribution space worldwide, M-S Cash Drawer prides itself on being a global leader in the manufacture of cash drawers and distribution of POS, barcode and card technology equipment. Today the company operates a manufacturing plant in Japan and distribution centers in Canada, Ireland and the United States.

The manufacturing side of the business began in 1945. "We introduced the concept of a steel cash drawer to the world," said Nash Kumar, Director of Sales, Marketing and Business Development at M-S Cash Drawer. "Until then, they were all made of wood. Today we have the largest installed base of cash drawers in the world."

Over the years as the number of channel partners has grown, so has demand. Kumar said that at one point M-S Cash Drawer was shipping 22,000 cash drawers to Sharp Electronics Corp. each month. Today it is the exclusive provider of cash drawers to Panasonic Corp., which supplies systems to McDonald's franchises worldwide. And other quick service restaurants and retail franchises have installed M-S Cash Drawer units across the globe.

"In 1974 we started the distribution facility in the United States to reach out to resellers, because a lot of resellers were asking for our products," Kumar said. "We gradually started the distribution arm, and then we started adding ally products. We're now a full-fledged distributor of POS equipment."

As a distributor, M-S Cash Drawer distributes for such brands as Bixolon, DataLogic, EchoPOS, ELO, Honeywell, ID TECH, Ingenico, NCC, Protech, Sharp, Star Micronics, Touch Dynamic and TabletKiosk, among others.

Fleet of footprint

One aspect of selling products globally is the need for agility in each market. "We had an inclined bill concept for bigger-sized cash drawers in Europe," Kumar said. "They don't use their cash drawers where the bills lay flat, so we came up with this 13-inch cash drawer, which is becoming very popular in the mobile POS environment where a lot of tablet POS people want a compact cash drawer."

He said the 13-inch-wide model was the first cash drawer in the world to accommodate the unique money tray configurations common in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and other regions. Its cash drawers can interface with electronic cash registers, receipt printers or directly to the serial, parallel or USB port of a PC or data terminal.

A simple conversion kit makes its modular components field upgradeable. "If I can convert a printer interface to a USB or vice versa in the field, it protects an end customer's investment in the product," Kumar said. "It becomes a scalable product that can evolve or change based on the changing needs related to use of a cash drawer."

Part of that scalability revolves around configuring orders to optimize merchant checkout flows. "Sometimes customers might not want a one-to-one ratio of everything, so they might say, 'Can we do 10 cash drawers, 10 printers, but only 2 barcode scanners' because they're a convenience store and that's where most of the transactions take place," Kumar said.

Sales lead and training driven

With decades of experience under its belt, M-S Cash Drawer gladly shares its expertise in product consultation and selection. The company also conducts ongoing partner events at various locations and offers a monthly e-newsletter for its ISO and other channel partners.

For M-S Cash Drawer channel partners, there is generally no shortage of leads either. According to the company, on average, it distributes over 300 qualified end-user leads per month at no cost to its channel partners. Kumar pointed out that the company asks a lot of questions upfront to ensure merchant leads match an ISO's profile in terms of merchant services bundled. And its cash drawers can be branded as needed.

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