With 18 million Machines installed worldwide, the Vending Machine Industry is an attractive market growing at a 10% annual rate. Telemetry system will play a big role in this expansion. Route Management & Maintenance are key aspects to keep the business growing healthy.
We have develop a proof-of-concept Telemetry System with Arduino, Heroku and Force.com. We use the Arduino as a WebClient, we get an audit file from the machine mother board and send it to Salesforce.com through a Rails App.
In Salesforce, we treat this information in severals ways to obtain: Sales Performance (Units Solds, Gross and Net Revenue), Inventory and Route Management. We have also setup thresholds on stock level to send an alerts when a Product has gone below it. You just have to follow it on Chatter!
The Route Management Feature is the heart of the Operations Team. At any moment of the day, the Route Manager can generate a Map and Report of the Machines that need to be visit. This includes the quantity of product that the drivers should take with them, as well as the approximate time to finish the route.
The idea came to us after looking how the family business was getting out of the game, and finding out that a friend in College had develop a connection between Arduino and a Vending Machine. After working with Salesforce.com we though about making it the project for the hackathon. Specially after the seamless capability of the mobile app. We only had to worry to develop the features that we needed, we did not have to worry about the framework.
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