11 Apr Camelback Vending Services Credits Its Rapid Growth to Cantaloupe System’s Seed Remote Monitoring Technology
Mike and Jodi Glimpse started Camelback Vending of Phoenix area, AZ, in December 2004 when they purchased a small twenty machine route. Today the company, which specializes in providing healthy and traditional vending to local area schools and businesses, 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 contributed greatly to the company’s growth.
“Camelback initially installed Cantaloupe’s Seed remote monitoring system in 12 ice cream machines to monitor temperature fluctuations, unplugged machines and bin errors. We soon realized that we were getting additional efficiencies,” Mike Glimpse said. “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 installed.
According to Jodi Glimpse, “Cantaloupe has helped us grow by dramatically improving customer satisfaction and, therefore, providing a major competitive advantage during the sales process. All of 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 by an independent third party, customers are confident they are being paid honest commissions and our school accounts can verify that we are complying with the state’s 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 growth without the typical overhead cost. Camelback implemented Seed’s dynamic scheduling program on all its routes, and the real world results have been outstanding. As Mike Glimpse said, “We configure Seed to schedule our machines for service based on a few factors including: how much money we want 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 twenty five percent.”
Camelback Vending also utilizes the Seed “Alerts” feature, which monitors machine health, is able to identify and notify Camelback
management about malfunctions so that problems can be corrected quickly. “Before utilizing remote monitoring we were receiving about 15 to 20 calls 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 2 or 3 calls from customers because we have already taken care of the problem before they even know about it. This not only leads to higher customer satisfaction, but also results in reduced
sales loss due to malfunctioning machines.”
Camelback attributes much of their success to the enthusiastic satisfaction of their customers, protecting them from many of their non technology savvy competitors. “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!” Rachel Angulo, Gilbert School District.
Source: PR NewsWire