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Camelback Vending, Phoenix, Ariz., Credits Success To Seed Remote Machine Monitoring


Mike and Jodi Glimpse started Camelback Vending of Phoenix, Ariz., in December 2004 when they purchased a 20-machine route. Today the company, which specializes in providing healthy vending to local area schools, has grown to six high volume routes. The Glimpses believe that the use of the Seed Remote Monitoring System on all of their company's machines has made it possible for Camelback Vending to offer the highest quality service to its customers which, in turn, has contributing greatly to the company's remarkable growth.

"Camelback initially installed Cantaloupe's Seed remote monitoring system in 12 ice cream machines to monitor temperature fluctuations, unplugged machines and bid errors. We soon realized that we were getting additional efficiencies," Mike Glimpse said in a prepared statement. "Because now we knew ahead of time what products each machine required, the driver carried only the appropriate merchandise and needed to make only one trip to service each machine."

In January of 2006, Camelback made the commitment to install Seed in all of its existing equipment and required that Seed be part of all new machines purchased.

According to Jodi Glimpse, "Cantaloupe has helped us grow by dramatically improving customer satisfaction and, therefore, providing a major competitive advantage during the bidding process. All Camelback's customers are given a unique username and password that allows them to access their machine data from our company web site www.camelbackvending.com. They can log in anytime time to see real time sales information including overall sales for each machine as well as sales by product. Because the information is automatically collected, customers are confident they are being paid honest commissions and our school accounts can verify that we are complying with healthy vending initiatives."

As Camelback expanded its vending operations and its usage of the Seed Wireless Vending System, it started to utilize many of the real time data tools to manage their explosive growth without the typical overhead cost.

Camelback implemented Seed's dynamic scheduling program on all its routes, and the real world results have been phenomenal. Mike Glimpse said, "We configured Seed to schedule our machines for service based on a few factors including; how much money we wanted there to be in a machine at time of service and, a maximum threshold we would accept of sold out items." Using these criteria, Seed organizes Camelback's vending machines by location and sub-routes and develops a daily schedule for each route based on real-time information.

"As a result of switching to dynamic scheduling," Mike noted, "we were able to consolidate 8 routes into 6, thus increasing route efficiency by 25 percent."

Camelback Vending has also utilized the Seed "Alerts" feature, which monitors machine health, was able to identify and notify Camelback management about malfunctions so that problems could be corrected quickly. "We were handling about 15 to 20 problem service call in a day," said Mike Glimpse. "The great thing about Seed is that it sends machine malfunction alerts directly to our cell phones and emails. Most days we now receive only two or three problem calls from customers because we have already dispatched someone to fix the problem. This not only leads to higher customer satisfaction, but also results in reduced loss due to malfunctioning machines."

Camelback attributes much of their success to the enthusiastic satisfaction of their customers. "You have a statement of the info we need and our checks every month on time, and, I must tell you that I enjoy working with you and your company. You are the exception to the other vending companies we have worked with. Muchas gracias!" said Rachel Angulo, a spokesperson for the Gilbert, Ariz. school district.






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