It’s all about integration when Ian Reynolds-Young visits Vendman HQ to witness a pivotal moment in the development of vending.
Vendman’s smart new HQ is 99% complete and guests arriving for the first time since the monumental refurbishment clock the differences immediately.
Entrance is via London Road now, through a door that opens itself smartly and leads visitors to a reception area that comfortably accommodates the four of us, even though we all contrive to arrive en-masse.
The four of us? There’s Ed Fraser, MD of Parcel Holders and his colleagues Monika Douglas and Richard Sandison. And me.
We’re offered a drink (from shiny new N&W Wittenborg 9100, no less) and then we’re ushered up to the board room, which turns out to be an air-conditioned, hi-tech, connected meeting space capable of hosting not only our posse, but also Rob Little and his team, which consists of Nathan Little, Daniel Hamby; Chris Wright and Emma Callyear.
Integration
The name of the game today is ‘integration’, and I like to think that, when it comes to this particular milestone, I was in on it from the beginning. Y’see, a while ago I was able to play a small part in facilitating the production of a video featuring Snack Time and Parcel Holders. SnackTime’s ‘Service Engineer of the Year’ Vendie winner, Dave Bryant, was the star man.
The video was a cross between ‘a day in the life of Dave’ and ‘look how easy and convenient it is to use Parcel Holders as part of your parts replacement solution.’ Thanks to the fact that Dave turned out to be a natural on camera, it’s well worth a look, by the way, here.
But that’s beside the point: the thing is, when the camera rolled and Dave was asked to describe a typical working day with SnackTime and Parcel Holders, he said immediately, ‘well, of course, the first thing I do is log on to Vendman’.
Oops.
‘Eureka!’
It struck me then that this is the case for the vast majority of Service engineers in the UK – not to mention route operators. Isn’t around 80% of them that log-on to Vendman with their cornflakes of a morning?
Not that I shouted ‘Eureka!’ at the time. It didn’t occur to me then just how great it would be if all those people, happily using Vendman day after day, could use that trusted and familiar platform to arrange for the purchase and delivery of replacement parts via Parcel Holders. Without having to go the to the trouble of logging on the Parcel Holders site. Integration?
It didn’t occur to me, but it did occur to Ed Fraser and Rob Little…
They agreed that the egg-heads at Parcel Holders would create something called an API and subsequently, hand it over to their fellow egg-heads at Vendman. Thanks to this mysterious API thing, Vendman’s boffins, invoking their unspeakably dark powers to unleash astonishing feats of technical jiggery-pokery, have been able to allow Vendman users to avail themselves of Parcel Holders’ award winning services – without having to log on the Parcel Holders web site.
Then can ‘miss out the middle man’.
Very, very nearly ‘good to go’.
Back in the room, today’s demo, led by Nathan (with the counsel of Chris to call upon where required), shows his audience just how easy it is to make the two, formerly disparate platforms ‘speak to each other’.
There’s very little left to do, in fact: for instance, the respective backroom teams need to make sure that ‘events’ in the delivery cycle are allocated the same name in each database – stuff like that, little more than ‘t’ crossing and ‘i’ dotting… Very, very nearly ‘good to go’.
Mission Accomplished
Mission accomplished: the meeting winds-up with smiles, handshakes and congratulations all round, plus an agreement as to which Vendman Centre of Excellence will be invited to try the new solution for size…
Expect that particular announcement at Vendman’s ‘2016: The Year of Integration’ event, which takes place next month in Stratford-upon-Avon’. Rest assured: Planet Vending will be there.
*We’d like to thank Rob Little and Ed Fraser for inviting Planet Vending to sit in on such an pivotal event in the development of vending.
