Smart beverage vending machines are tea and coffee machines in offices that are connected to the internet and report every cup they serve. With these reports, the company that runs the machines can refill and repair each one before it runs out or breaks down. They are also called connected brewing machines. The machine usually belongs to a tea or coffee chain, or to a vending company, not to the office.
How does a machine report? It has a small computer inside, with a SIM card or a Wi-Fi connection. It counts every cup, by type. Sensors measure how much water, milk powder and tea premix are left. If a part fails, the machine records an error code. Every few minutes, it sends these readings to the company's cloud software. A company with thousands of machines manages their SIM cards through IoT connectivity management. A connected device of this kind runs software in three places: on the machine, in a phone app and in the cloud. This is explained under IoT architecture.
Imagine an office in Gurugram with 300 employees and two chai machines on its pantry floor. Yesterday, machine A served 410 cups: 260 masala chai, 90 ginger tea and 60 coffees. This morning, it reports 2 kg of masala tea premix left. Each cup uses 15 g of premix, so 2 kg is enough for about 130 cups. At yesterday's pace, the premix will run out at about 3 p.m. The cloud software adds the office to a technician's route for 11 a.m. He brings premix and also cleans the brewing unit, which reported an error code at 9:40. Nobody in the office notices that anything was ever low.
The forecast is the important part. The software learns each machine's pattern: more cups on Monday mornings, fewer during holidays and on Fridays. This is demand forecasting, used for one machine at a time. The technicians' daily routes are planned in field service management software, which decides which machines each technician visits, and in what order.
Without reports, the vendor sends technicians on a fixed schedule. Some machines run dry before the visit, and others are visited when they are still full. With reports, a chain of tea machines is run like a fleet: every machine is watched from one screen. The cup counts are also useful for billing. When the office pays per cup, the counts become the monthly bill. They can also appear in the office's corporate cafeteria management reports.