Bar Analytics relies on Super SIM to turn beer pours into insights.
Thousands of years since its inception, beer (that golden, malty flavored, alcoholic beverage) is the third most consumed beverage in the world today.
Today, though, most breweries have little insight into customers, buying patterns, or quality of their beer flowing through taps. That’s all changing thanks to Bar Analytics. Now global beer brands have visibility into each and every pour—including temperature, volume, and quality, by detecting line cleaning—to help deliver an experience that lives up to their brand.Serving up data with IoT
At the end of the day, better quality beer means increased sales for multi-national breweries. That’s where Bar Analytics comes in.
Their cellular-connected flow sensors with power, antennae, and SIM card sit right inside beer taps and turn each of those pours into valuable business data. To win and retain the largest breweries in the world as customers, it is critical Bar Analytics establishes real-time, trustworthy data connectivity.Taps running dry on data
Beer taps are often under counters and in cellars where coverage can be extremely poor, making cellular coverage a challenge for their connected beer taps. Downtime in sensors means lost data—and for Bar Analytics, data is their revenue. “Imagine if we notified our customer that sales of their product plummeted at the last football match, but in reality the network was down,” said Marc de Vos, co-founder of Bar Analytics. “We’d lose that customer faster than you could pour a beer.”
With a traditional cellular provider, Bar Analytics lacked control over network quality. Consequently, their connectivity was pushed to the cheapest network, rather than the best signal. This “network steering” was delaying access to data and eroding customer confidence.
Working with a long list of carriers could solve the problem, but it also would be costly to scale, with different monthly bills to pay at differing rates—plus multiple customer care numbers to attempt to resolve connectivity issues. This approach would kill their margins and proved too costly for Bar Analytics.
Adding to the high operating costs, Bar Analytics dealt with a cumbersome, manual approach to managing connectivity and SIMs. With different carriers in every region, they lacked a systematic way to accommodate their global customers and deploy their connected taps in all of the countries they wanted to operate in. Each carrier had their own management console and APIs were poor quality—if they existed at all. To serve multi-national breweries, Bar Analytics needed an automated process to access, troubleshoot, provision, and manage the SIMs anywhere in the world.Super SIM puts Bar Analytics in control
With Twilio as their new connectivity partner, Bar Analytics can choose from hundreds of networks for every SIM and every device, ensuring they can offer their customers trustworthy, real-time insights into beer consumption in over 100 countries.
“With Super SIM, we’ve achieved a 10 percent increase in availability of our product, which is very difficult to do” said de Vos. “And with that reliability, we were able to land some of the biggest brands in the industry.”
Since leveraging one SIM for all the countries they want to operate in, they’ll never have to manage carriers again: “With Twilio, we can prioritize the network and carrier in any given geography and benefit from Twilio’s super network with coverage in 170+ countries,” said de Vos. “That flexibility to choose the network that works best for each device type and device location was key to meeting our customers’ expectations.”
After the connected taps are deployed in retail bars, Bar Analytics uses Twilio connectivity management APIs to activate, suspend, or troubleshoot SIMs out in the field. “Thanks to the 80 percent operating cost savings we achieved by partnering with Twilio, we were able to hit the margins we needed in order to deliver a completely unique product to the market,” added de Vos. “In the first six months of operating with Twilio, we captured information on 6.5 million pours.”
Scaling taps… and their value
With Super SIM and APIs delivering the high-quality connectivity they need, Bar Analytics is accelerating their growth. “Twilio’s platform gives us the confidence to deliver customers a live view into product preferences—even during a sporting event,” de Vos added. “As our customers roll out products in new regions, we can scale seamlessly with them and deliver insights into global taste preferences with the same level of confidence.”