IoT Expertise Improves Real-Time Control for Smart Beverage Dispensing

Sestra Systems’ new end-to-end solution incorporates IoT from the consumer to the production environment, providing real-time visibility and control.

The Challenge

Sestra Systems turns beverage taps into IoT-connected devices, improving service, preventing loss and ensuring compliance. Control portion size, remotely lock taps, prevent theft, increase speed of service, and more – all with the push of a button.

Sestra Systems developed a unique solution to configure, manage and operate beverage dispensing on devices located around the world.

Sestra devices are in the critical path for their customers’ food and beverage programs, and require optimal performance, so they needed to be monitored to ensure they are dispensing without interruption.

Sestra also needed to publish diagnostic logs for each device “pour” to help its engineers troubleshoot service failures. The company wanted a “lightweight” solution to minimize latency, improve customer service, and free up device resources for servicing.

Offline functionality was also required. Sestra planned to eventually deploy these dispensing devices on cruise ships, which often go without internet for weeks, with a maximum reuse of cloud artifacts.

To meet these requirements and accelerate growth, Sestra wanted a low-cost solution, engineered for scalability and without significant maintenance costs.

Why Cloud Application Modernization Service From Hitachi Vantara?

By bringing data from different sensor types in real time to its data lake, this Cloud solution allows predictive insights to enable automatic intelligent actions (see Figure 1).

This on-premises offering delivers:

• Accelerated time to value through reusable cloud artifacts.
• Effective control of a wide range of devices or “things.”
• Highly secure and easy-to-manage encryption and authentication.
• Cloud-agnostic approach based on open standards like MQTT and the serverless framework.
• On-premises solution that reuses cloud artifacts, allowing devices to function in remote locations with minimal connectivity.
• AI @ Scale allows machine learning on cloud.
• Support for data collection and decisions at edge.

This solution’s services are ready to use with any cloud IoT solution, immediately turning disconnected devices into smart devices.

All Linux and UNIX systems, as well as real-time operating systems (RTOS) are supported out of the box, with custom adapters available to handle customer-specific data publishing using open standards like JSON. And you can quickly send the data to cloud data lakes and transactional databases to modernize existing or create new intelligent customer applications.

Adoption of the MQTT protocol allows communication between connected devices and cloud IoT stacks. Combining this protocol with Hitachi Vantara’s cloud-native development and proprietary device control logic, creates a unique, reusable stack for modernizing applications and creating AI @ Scale. This architecture will grow and adapt to hyperscale workloads and easily incorporate new technologies to create new solutions.

Cloud Application Modernization Service From Hitachi Vantara

The IoT solution developed for Sestra Systems (see Figure 2) encompasses the following:

• An MQTT agent (under 1MB of space) with a local device database running on each dispensing device.
• Serverless framework, which creates various cloud artifacts to ingest data from cloud broker to database, including real-time visibility.
• Reuse of the existing customer database services and presentation layers to enhance existing business use cases.
• Bulk provisioning of devices offers a complete end-to-end solution from the factory floor to the production environment.

Once the devices are provisioned, the configurable agent service captures telemetry data like CPU usage, available memory, diagnostic logs per pour. It also services all commands.

The solution sets IoT-specific rules in the cloud to move the data from any cloud service provider’s MQTT broker to various endpoints.

Top benefits and capabilities of the solution include:

• Scalability. Add AWS Kinesis when scaling volumes from hundreds to billions of devices.
• Low cost and high value. Use a serverless framework to develop and deploy services.

The Sestra IoT Solution

This IoT solution includes:

• Push-to-pour console.
• Portion control system.
• Touchless tap.
• In-line chilling.
• Keg dispensing.
• Sestra portal.
• Monitoring and alerts.
• Remote station manager.

Business Benefits

Cloud Application Modernization Service:

• Quickly modernizes and improves the functionality of existing application.
• Provides a solution that meets the varying online and offline requirements of customers across industries.
• Significantly reduces the time to diagnose and resolve device issues, minimizing any lost revenue when problems occur.
• Allows creation of a highly scalable solution to accommodate expected future growth, while keeping costs low.
• Provides rich data to support better understanding of all devices and improve overall service delivery and optimization and new potential.

Next Steps

For more information on how Cloud Application Modernization Service from Hitachi Vantara can turn your disconnected devices into smart devices, contact your Hitachi Vantara representative or visit HitachiVantara.com.

About Hitachi Vantara

Your data is the key to new revenue, better customer experiences and lower costs. With technology and expertise, Hitachi Vantara drives data to meaningful outcomes.

About Sestra Systems

Sestra Systems (www.sestrasystems.com) turns beverage taps into IoT-connected devices, improving service, preventing loss and ensuring compliance. Companies can control portion size, remotely lock taps, prevent theft, increase speed of service, and more – all with the push of a button.