New Vending Bureau Service

Landis+Gyr’s Vending Bureau service provides a cost effective vending and management solution for small to medium sized prepayment electricity meter installations. One of the major benefits of the Vending Bureau service is that Landis+Gyr manages the complex back-office and data servers for the entity, while they only have to be concerned with the point-of sale and sale of prepayment electricity to the consumer, thereby ensuring that the entity does have to investment in the IT infrastructure of the back office.
While the service is mainly aimed at Property Managing agents, landlords and Body Corporates, the service could also be used by small municipalities, who wish to implement a prepayment metering solution, but who do not wish to make the investment of the vending system back-office infrastructure.

Landis+Gyr prepayment meters can be purchased directly by the entities who must contract their own electrical contractor to install the prepayment meter. Landis+Gyr then sets up the IT infrastructure required to implement the prepayment vending system and manages the back-office environment. In the case where the Property Managing agents or landlords would like to sell the prepayment electricity vouchers to their tenants using either a fixed or portable point-of-sale device, all they need is basic PC literacy skills to manage the point of sale device without the need for high level IT staff as the complexity of the system is managed at the Vending Bureau back-office.

Another attractive alternative to the point-of-sale devices for selling the electricity to the tenants, is Landis+Gyr’s scratch card solution for buying prepayment electricity. This provides the consumer with an easy and convenient means to purchasing electricity. The scratch card is simply purchased from the Property Managing agents, Body Corporate or Landlord. On purchasing the scratch card in a denomination of their choice, the consumer scratches the foil area at the back of the card to reveal a PIN number. Using their cellphone, the consumer simply sends an SMS text message containing their prepayment meter serial number plus the scratch card PIN number to the cellphone number printed on the back of the card. Shortly thereafter, the consumer will receive the kWh credit transfer number via SMS from the Vending Bureau, which they then enter into the keypad of their Cashpower prepayment meter. This solution means that the Property Managing Agents, Body Corporates or Landlords do not require any point of sale devices for selling prepayment electricity to their tenants.

In addition, for those entities who wish to offer a point-of-sale service to their tenants and also have a level of management function such as registering new meters on the system, Landis+Gyr offers an e-Management Xpress software tool which is installed on a standard entry level desktop computer and which connects to the Vending Bureau via the Internet.

The Vending Bureau is hosted by an external independent four star, state-of-the-art data centre, thereby ensuring the integrity of the data and around the clock availability for the purchase of prepayment electricity, irrespective of power failures.

For more information, please contact Mark de Kock at mark.dekock@landisgyr.com