Great coffee at the office is no longer considered a perk but a basic necessity. Ideally, it can even lure remote employees into the office from time to time just for a foamy latte or a rejuvenating shot of espresso. This means that OCS operators have their work cut out for them.
Without telemetry, maintaining excellence becomes a veritable challenge as there is no data available to support decision-making. Yet, a coffee machine equipped with the vBox, the IoT device by Vendon, is capable of reporting data to the Vendon Cloud platform, where raw data is transformed into meaningful insights.
Here are five reports by Vendon that any OCS operator will find indispensable when it comes to ensuring that every machine reaches its full potential.
Downtime Report
It is a truth universally acknowledged that downtime equals lost sales and lost revenue. Thus, it is vital that OCS operators pay attention to issues that render the machine unable to perform and take action immediately. The Downtime Report, largely associated with vending, is actually a great monitoring tool for coffee operators. Here, trouble with payment devices might not apply but there can be other culprits, for instance, temperature excursions that affect machine performance. If the temperature is often too high or too low, it may signal that a technical maintenance visit is in order. Moreover, frequent power outages can point to consumers trying to resolve problems by switching the machine off and on again repeatedly. With Vendon, you can quickly identify machines that require your attention instead of waiting to receive a call from an unhappy customer.
Cleaning Report
For a cup of coffee to taste good, the coffee machine must be clean. This is especially true when it comes to machines that use real milk – a sour brew will for sure ruin any coffee fan’s morning. A good routine to implement is conducting a full cleaning in the evening and brewing fresh and delicious coffee the next morning. However, from time to time, someone makes a coffee after the full cleaning, which consequently affects the quality of the first drinks of the following morning. To keep an eye on these situations, use the Cleaning Report available in the
Vendon Cloud, which tells you if any cups have been made after the final cleaning of the day. With this information at hand, you can easily address taste and quality questions.
Component Usage
The office coffee business is very competitive hence operators often employ the pay-per-ingredient model where the machine is rented free of charge and the customer pays for the beans. This approach does, however, entail a risk of customers sourcing their own coffee beans elsewhere to cut costs or because deliveries are not aligned with consumption. With recipes in place in the Vendon Cloud platform, ingredient consumption is tracked automatically. IoT solutions enable operators to compare the quantity of beans delivered to the location with the actual ingredient consumption and spot inconsistencies easily to serve as grounds for subsequent discussions with the customer.
Sales Overview
It’s sometimes difficult to match the coffee machine with the location on the first try. The perfect model very much depends on the required output, and predictions are not always grounded in reality. A coffee machine that’s too powerful or too small for a given location robs you of an opportunity to produce more cups on the same device elsewhere or, on the contrary, can lead consumers to source their afternoon fuel somewhere else. This is a question easily answered with the help of telemetry by Vendon.
Once the novelty of the new machine has worn off and consumption has stabilized, you can start assessing whether the cups made during the day meet the capacity of the coffee machine. You can quickly gauge this by turning to the Sales Overview – this report displays the daily output of every machine in your fleet, making it easy to spot underperformers and overachievers. Then, you can drill into the particulars in the Analytics section, which we’ll cover next.
Consumption Moments
Vendon offers a powerful Analytics add-on, and it is a goldmine for any operator looking to optimize their fleet performance. For the OCS sector, the Consumption Moments report provides Vendon Cloud users with valuable insights on sales distribution over the course of the day. Thus, operators can easily identify rush hours and sales slumps, and determine which drinks are favored at each location the most. For instance, if the machine is maxed out in the morning, it might be worth installing a second machine, or swapping one large machine for two smaller ones. Or, if hot water consumption is through the roof and coffee sales remain low, there might be a problem with the recipes. The main takeaway here is that this data allows operators to be proactive instead of reactive. Such an approach leads to a positive impact not just on numbers but client relationships and user satisfaction.
One small change may not be enough to make or break a business but a combination of small improvements can bring about a noticeable change. The good news is – making improvements is much easier if guesswork is eliminated, which is what Vendon IoT, telemetry and payment solutions are all about.
Start optimizing your coffee or vending business today and boost your revenue – get in touch with us at
grow@vendon.net or your local distributor.
