One of the greatest advantages of a connected machine is knowing its status at all times. However, as your fleet grows, keeping up with the abundance of information may become overwhelming. Yet, there is no need for despair. Vendon IoT and telemetry platform offers the best of both worlds – an extensive collection of technical events from a wide range of machines by various manufacturers and convenient tools to organize machine maintenance effortlessly.
Issue monitoring
The first place to always check for any vending or coffee machine issues is, of course, the Dashboard. The Overall status and Attention required widgets will alert you to the main machine malfunctions, like power outages, network problems, or communication issues.
A click on the red section of the Overall status widget will take you to the Monitoring section for a comprehensive overview of the problematic machines.
For a visual representation of the same, open the Map – it shows all locations on your account with their statuses – green for clear, blue for stock shortages, and red for serious errors, like no power.
Tip: If the machine has both stock issues and errors, errors will take priority so the location will have a red pin on the map.
Event tags
Sorting through pages and pages of events will take up a lot of any operator’s time, so a sorting system is a must. To give you a head start, Vendon has given every single event a default tag, such as “product”, “payment”, “sensor” and others that you can use as a filter. However, you can always create your own custom tags and add them to events you want. These will come in handy when you want to set up a notification system.
Tip: The Events page remembers the last set of filters you have used. So if you’re mostly interested in a specific type of event, you will not need to select the filters from scratch every time.
Notifications and alerts
Our alerts system allows you to receive alerts via email, text message, or as a notification on your phone (you will need to install the Vendon Mobile app for this). The alerts are sent in near real-time so you will be instantly informed in case of an issue.
However, to stop you from worrying about a two-second power outage or a brief coin mechanism error that is resolved within seconds, we offer event delays – that is, a notification is triggered only if the event exceeds a certain duration that you decide. This feature will help you limit the number of notifications you receive and allow you to focus on the really important ones.
Tip: For extra safety, you can choose to receive notifications via multiple communication channels, or receive some as app notifications while others as emails, for instance.
Manual event resolution
Every now and then an event remains unresolved even though the problem does not exist anymore. This false error can be an inconvenience and even result in unnecessary visits to the machine. To remedy this, use the manual event resolution feature: it works on any active event and allows you to keep the machine history clean and accurate.
Tip: Events can be resolved both via the large Event list and in the Machine account as well.
Ignoring events
Not all events are created equal, and some of them might not be of any interest to you. It can also happen that machines are sending erroneous events that do not need tending to. In such cases, you can choose to ignore certain events – once ignored, notifications will not be sent, and the events will not appear in the default event list. You can always access the list of ignored events and remove them from the blacklist, or add new ones to it.
Tip: Events are ignored on the whole account level and apply to all machines on the account.
Planificación de rutas
Some events can only be resolved with a technician’s visit to the machine. With Vendon route planning, these technical visits can be scheduled, that is, routes can be created based on specific active events in the machines.
Once the technician is on location, they can also add notes to the specific event, for instance, describe the fix that was applied or inform the back office that a new part must be ordered for the problem to be solved. This can be done easily via the Vendon Mobile app, which is immediately synced to the Cloud.
Tip: The route planning tool allows you to specify the maximum duration of the active event you are looking for. That way, falsely active events from two years ago will not light up every time you create routes.
Soporte para apps móviles
A vending or a coffee business requires users to be on the go quite a bit, and the Vendon Mobile app is a perfect companion. All the essential information about your machine fleet is always within reach, and it is suited to both technicians and managers. Identify machines that need attention just by looking at the dashboard, drill into historical events on a machine level, or follow the progress of the technician’s route – all of your machine monitoring needs are sorted!
Tip: The mobile app, just like our Cloud solution, is available in multiple languages.
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.
