Seed Enterprise Offers New Features for Enhanced Merchandising and Routing, as well as Reducing PAR Levels; Coming Soon: Sophisticated Dashboard for Monitoring Key Performance Indicators

January 25, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO ─ Cantaloupe Systems today announced Seed Enterprise, a powerful new product designed to help vending operators aggressively boost top-line growth while minimizing costs, no matter how large their vending operations. Seed Enterprise includes all the business-boosting technology available in Cantaloupe Systems’ flagship Seed Pro product, plus sophisticated extra features to help tech-adept operators increase revenue even more and save more time.

“Seed Enterprise is the fully-featured product designed with Seed power users in mind,” said Anant Agrawal, Cantaloupe co-founder and chief marketing officer. “We’ve taken the most valuable features of Seed Pro and added advanced new automation and analytics tools to create the most powerful vending optimization platform on the market.”

As an upgrade to Seed Pro, Seed Enterprise contains all Seed Pro’s features plus:

• No More Par™: Never set a par level again! Par levels for slow-selling items are automatically reduced to limit spoils, while faster-selling items get Par increases to maximize service intervals and prevent empty columns.  For most operators, No More Par quickly reduces field inventory by tens of thousands of dollars.
• Seed Auto-Merchandiser ™: Building upon the single-machine Merchandising Wizard included free with Seed Pro, the Seed Auto-Merchandiser dramatically accelerates smart merchandising across large numbers of machines by integrating automated merchandising recommendations into daily route-scheduling workflow. Operators need invest just a few minutes per day to keep many routes’ planograms optimized.
• Seed Routing™: Automatically balances daily workload across drivers of adjacent routes, ensuring less overtime, better truck utilization and more consistent customer service even during spikes in demand.
• Seed Inventory Scheduler™: Automatically adjusts machine inventory frequency, rewarding drivers who take accurate inventories and saving driver time.
• Multi-Branch Support: Automatically filter Seed features to one branch; branch personnel only see data they need, while managers can get a cross-branch roll-up view.
• Seed KPI Dashboards™: (coming soon) Manage a vending business in in real-time with instant reporting on business objectives, making comparisons across routes and over time. This feature is optimized for mobile devices, tablets and big-screen “mission control” monitors, so operators can manage their business from any device.

Like Seed Pro, Seed Enterprise is a cloud-hosted, web-based application that will be improved frequently, with major feature releases planned four times per year. As with Seed Pro, there’s no software to install and no hardware to buy.

About Seed Platform™

Cantaloupe Systems’ Seed Platform, the most complete and effective vending optimization platform in the industry, gathers data from machines wirelessly over the Internet to enable optimized scheduling that delivers maximum route and merchandising efficiencies. By analyzing inventory levels, cash in the machine and geographic considerations, the web-based application automatically generates the most efficient delivery schedules and pick lists based on real-time, item-level sales data. With this information, orders are loaded by warehouse personnel for each machine, providing drivers with more time to focus on servicing their routes. Also, vending operators have tools to reconcile daily cash collection, and capture spoilage and inventory variances. SeedSync™, a customizable integration tool that is part of the Seed Platform, integrates all collected data with existing vending management or other software packages, ensuring company-wide information integrity. Cantaloupe Systems’ Seed remote monitoring technology is currently installed in over 70,000 vending machines in the U.S. states and Canada.

About Cantaloupe Systems

San Francisco-based Cantaloupe Systems, Inc., is the fastest-growing, wireless-enabled vending solutions  provider. The company was founded in 2002 by engineers Mandeep Arora, a second-generation vending professional, and Anant Agrawal to provide automated merchandising and business intelligence technology to the $55 billion global vending industry. Installed in individual vending machines, the Cantaloupe Retail Optimization Platform (CROP)™ applies state of the art business intelligence and analytics to remotely-monitored real-time vending sales data to suggest optimized next-best-step business decisions. The result: vending operators know how to generate the greatest revenue and margin from each machine with optimized service efficiencies and the least operational cost. Operators using CROP and Seed® technologies average $35,000 in annual savings per route, can replenish 80 percent more machines per week and can reduce their carbon footprint by 40 percent through the elimination of unnecessary truck travel and smaller loads per truck.

Cantaloupe Systems is backed by Global Environment Fund of Chevy Chase, MD., and Foundation Capital of Menlo Park, CA.  For more information, please visit http://www.cantaloupesys.com.