Bluetooth, Wifi, 2G, LTE CatM1, NB (NarrowBand) IOT

Is either already here, or it's in the pipeline of what we are doing - but what are these and what is the best for you?

Elstat release of EMS3000 generation is a marking milestone in the market of connected controllers and is a powerful tool to enable, with the latest generation of Bluetooth chipset, data capturing through BLE technology. To use your sales representative and technician routine visits to Stores where connected coolers have been deployed and, at the same time, capture coolers’ data, with minimal interference in their specific jobs, is powerful. As companies develop platforms to analyse massive data and generate insights and action plans, it’s key that they can trust the mechanism which will bring this valuable resource – data is the new gold! Along with Bluetooth capability, market has been profiting to connect their field staff with data never thought in the past. With easy SDK integration into their already existent apps, Bluetooth connectivity opens opportunities so that field team can, with minimum cost, understand how the cooler has been technically performing and address an issue in a more assertive way, or have elements to convince the store owner when are the best times to stock his cooler or how the cooler sales are generating profits compared to the energy consumed by the equipment. Wi-Fi network is also a new communication gateway that can be smartly used to automatic upload your data, and, at the same time, it creates a channel to improve the relationship with your customers. As it increases around the world the number of Wi-Fi networks, getting your cooler location through the basic details of the Wi-Fi can be a brilliant solution – and a cheap one. Tailored applications can encourage customers to connect your controller to his personal Wi-Fi, as you design mechanisms that can help him optimize his equipment usage, inform of proactive actions to support technical issues and raise satisfaction, being it through information of product deliveries or regular checking if all Stock Keeping Units (SKU) desired were supplied as they should.

Further down the road, cellular technologies have already understood that IoT devices, such as our connected controllers, need trustable ways of communication, but specified to a market that send low volumes of data and requires a cheaper price than usual cellular network technology. As they call a Long-Term Evolution (LTE), Categories (CAT) M1 and NB1 have been designed to operate as low-power wide area (LPWA) cellular technologies, each with it own specific characteristics, but both providing excellence when it comes to cost optimization, power efficiency and coverage. If you think of a solution that excel in coverage and transfer, the NB1 simple wave form and low amount of data can penetrate easily through buildings and obstacles, making even that asset located in the back of a store accessible. However, you might need higher amounts of data and more mobility, so you can consider in this case the M1 as your ideal choice. No matter which, both are already robust enough networks that can pose the interrogation on which way the market should evolve to receive and send data. Don’t forget, we are not talking about excluding solutions: the ideal understanding is that they are all available and can be designed to address so many different scenarios and budgets. Bluetooth is there to enable clients with massive representatives in field to take advantage of their proximity and capture the data necessary, while Wi-Fi networks are well spread in so many areas that profiting for it to create engagement tools can be a smart solution for times like this, when pandemic and quarantines have changed everyone routine, including of your salesforce. On a perspective that years ago would be pointed as absurd due to market costs, cellular technologies now can propose a price that allow always-on devices to become so real and affordable. It’s a new reality of full monitoring, where perfect understanding of data can allow new opportunities to reduce costs and invest in qualifying the dialogue with a store, fully supported by data.

More than that, they challenge players in the beverage market on what is the long-term value you see in your asset: should it be limited to a marketing equipment, a way to create capillarity of your products around end customers, or when we think of connected controllers, therefore coolers, should we map it already in an environment of IoT devices and how they will interact? This a key decision you need to make, and soon cooler ownership value can be redesigned, in a way that it will be a rentable space for cooling hours. In this new scenario that cooler fleet might have new owners, they can create a chain of value that can start from the production line, with data from routine tests being shared to ensure cooling potentiality, to the point of sale, where Brands search for experts in offering the most secure environments to associate their products with high performance equipment and their managers, capable of sharing insights to point always the better direction on how to improve return over investment.