Challenge
Cup&Cino has hundreds of coffee machines spread around the world. The technicians needed to regularly visit all machines in person to check how many beverages their customers used every month to invoice them, and to understand whether the machine needed any maintenance. With a growing fleet of coffee machines, visiting machines quickly became costly and unfeasible.
Approach
Making coffee machines available for remote management seemed crucial to reducing on-site visits. Cup&Cino explored multiple options for tackling the problem, evaluating staffing an internal team, and hiring a vendor to deliver the solution. Even though having an internal team that resolves the challenge might bring some benefits, they decided to cooperate with vendors, mainly because having it in-house is cost ineffective. They conducted market research and discovered that the IoT platforms could resolve their problems.
Solution
The cooperation started with installing Spotflow Device SDK on the coffee machine's control board. The SDK enabled machines to work with the Spotflow IoT platform in the cloud. The new software image, which consists of new device software bundled with Spotflow Device SDK, was created and deployed on all machines. Once integrated with the device software, machines regularly send data to the platform's central storage.
To support the C&C web application that is used by executives and technicians, Spotflow enabled data routing to the underlying database. This allows them to use data about machine maintenance status, consumables, diagnostics logs, and more.
Comprehensive dashboards for executives and technicians were created to provide a real-time high-level overview of all machines and products, as well as the dashboard showing detailed information per machine and helping technicians troubleshoot issues.
Results
- Reduced on-site visits to maintain devices.
- Faster troubleshooting due to diagnostics data that are available in the cloud.
- One central interface to have an overview of health for all the machines.
- Ability to control devices from the cloud, such as restart them remotely.
- Full understanding of customer's behavior, such as their preferences. Thanks to dashboards showing the trends.
- Prediction of consumables needed per machine. That allows Cup&Cino to optimize the delivery, thus reducing the cost.
- Automatic invoicing of customers thanks to real-time availability of beverage consumption data.
