A single control room for a distributed vending estate
An operator running vending machines across several cities had no single place to see what was happening in the estate. Sales, stock levels and service visits each lived in a different tool, so the picture was always a day or two behind the machines themselves.
Industry: Retail & Consumer
The challenge
The operations team was rebuilding the same spreadsheet every morning, joining a card processor export to a stock count that had been typed in by hand. Nobody trusted the resulting numbers enough to act on them without checking a machine in person, so routes were planned on habit rather than on demand.
A sold out shelf could sit empty for most of a week before anyone noticed it. The machine knew, and had known since the moment the last item was dispensed, but nothing carried that fact to a person who could act on it. The cost was invisible in the accounts because a machine that sells nothing does not generate a line to look at.
Cash and card takings arrived on different schedules and in different shapes, so reconciling a single machine to a single day was a manual exercise. Margin was known at the company level at the end of a month and nowhere else, which meant a product could lose money in one location for a full quarter while the estate as a whole looked healthy.
What we built
- 01Live machine map and telemetry
- 02Real-time sales and profit and loss
- 03Inventory and low stock alerts
- 04Route planning from real demand
- 05Field app for drivers
- 06Operational AI insights
That is the outline. The PDF walks the same build through in detail: the screens, the data moving between them, and how each piece was put together.
