Our client is a reputed provider of coffee machines in India. They provide two types of machines, premix based and fresh-milk based. Both types of machines go to other businesses who are their customers and it’s the employees of their customers who enjoy different flavors of coffee and tea from their machines.
Much like the printer-ink situation, our client made money only when a lot of premix was being ordered by their customers, to put into their machines and make coffee for their employees. The premix business was also very competitive and nothing stopped any customer from using another brand of premix with their machines (which were of course subsidized to be able to sell their premix in the first place). This caused a huge loss of revenue and their business model was challenged.
At this very same time, their customers were intent on not needing to manage premix orders and wanted our client to ensure that machines were always stocked and they did not need their facility manager (their customer’s facility manager) to keep a watchful eye for premix or other consumables and keep re-ordering them.
Our client wished they could simply charge their customers for the cups of coffee and other beverages consumed so they could drive up their margins on one side and take this burden of managing premix off their customers’ hands.
iBot was approached with this problem and given our background with vending machines, we immediately got cracking on the solution. We integrated the iBot E-series Processor into their machine such that we could audit every cup getting dispensed and we sent this data to the iBot Portal.
Not only was our client able to see what their machines were dispensing, it even provided insights to our customer’s customer to see what their employees were consuming. They even got us to add RFID into the system so while their employees could consume at will, their contractors and visitors would need special cards that would allow them to dispense from these machines.
Our trusted iBot Hive is always there to ensure that iBot’s devices, apps and connectivity is running and manages any hardware and app upgrades ever so smoothly.
We enabled a pay-per-use mechanism for beverage dispensing machines. This allowed our customer to drive up their margins and their customer satisfaction! I’m sure you will agree that it’s not usual to see a combination of these to go up at the same time.
