Welcome to Datasym

Welcome to the Datasym website. The company began trading in 1979 as B&W Electronic Systems Ltd. During the ensuing 30 years, Datasym have written several generations of applications software offering cost-effective, state of the art solutions in catering management, hospitality and retailing. Datasym software integrates the whole trading cycle from purchase order to point of sale.

The first version of Menumark was written and installed in 1979. It was designed to be used with a custom built document scanner and a Commodore Pet with 8Kb of RAM. In June 1980 B&W Electronic Systems Ltd was formed to serve the hospital catering market as a result of the interest this system generated.

Menumark caused considerable interest amongst hospital caterers as the original scanning facility was enhanced by the development of recipe and menu costing.  There was wide publicity in hospital circles and the system was even featured on television in Tomorrow’s World.

1982 saw the company’s first involvement with point-of-sale equipment.  Communications were established between Menumark and the Sanyo 720 cash register using cassette tapes for input, output and storage. 

It wasn’t long after that Datasym was naturally chosen as the foremost company; mainly because of its strong corporate identity.

In the mid 1990s, the Menumark and Stockade systems were completely rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of the new 32 bit Windows operating system and at this time Datasym were asked by customers and dealers to link Menumark and Stockade to Toshiba TEC cash registers. The successful software link resulted in the long-term business relationship between the two companies which still remains today. Datasym’s Stockade product is offered for exclusive sale by Toshiba dealers whilst Menumark continues to serve the hospital catering market.

In 1999, the Custodial Division of Aramark Ltd. began to use Stockade for stock control within their prison shops. This led to the development of a specialist inmate ordering system, APCOS, which is now in use in over 45 prison sites all linked to a central Stockade head office system.

2003 saw Datasym’s first move into point of sale software as a result of the dealer’s wishes to have a single EPOS front and back office solution with Datasym’s high level of quality and performance.
An existing EPOS retail product, with years of research and development, was brought in, developed further and renamed to Datasym.POS (pronounced Datasym dot pos). DPOS, as it is also known, is now a fully featured retail and hospitality system capable of handling an enormous number of configurations.
To enable customers to receive the best level of customer service in terms of software, hardware and support, the T20 dealer partnership programme was launched. Each T20 partner is trained and qualified to install, support and maintain both Datasym’s software and Toshiba’s hardware.

2006 sees the launch of one of Datasym’s most ambitious project to date. MenuMate, the on ward meal ordering system, has been designed to work with a number of PDAs (Personal Digital assistants), tablet PCs and ultra mobile PCs to provide the most effective wastage saving, time saving and cost effective solution in the market place. This system has been designed from the outset with Microsoft’s .NET technology and uses a combination of web services and Microsoft SQL Server database to provide a solution that can be used by catering staff, dieticians and managers alike.

Focus

Our prime focus is to provide and support high quality, reliable products that are simple for the operators to use and offer value for money.