Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Discount or incentive
Patent
1998-09-01
2000-02-01
MacDonald, Allen R.
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Discount or incentive
705 22, 235381, 235385, G06F 1760
Patent
active
060213949
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a technology for allowing volume sales in a short period of time by estimating which product will be sold, how many and at what time zone of the day and preparing the product based on these estimates in an automatic vending machine.
BACKGROUND ART
Heretofore, in a cup type automatic vending machine for selling regular coffee and the like, after money such as coins and bills or a card such as a prepaid card (to be referred to as "money" hereinafter) has been inserted into the automatic vending machine and a product selection button has been depressed, coffee for one cup has been extracted and sold. However, since a waiting time for each sale is several tens of seconds with this system, a large number of customers cannot be handled at a time.
In recent years, there has been developed a cup type automatic vending machine of a system that a predetermined amount of coffee is previously made and stored in a storage tank at a peak time zone and supplied from the tank each time money is inserted and the product selection button is depressed. The automatic vending machine of this system is disclosed by Laid-open Japanese Patent Application No. Hei 1-237899. Employing this system, the waiting time is shortened to 10 seconds or so.
In this automatic vending machine, a built-in main control unit estimates sales of each day and as a result, extraction and storage operations are started a little before the estimated peak time zone. The sales estimates are made by recording the type of a product and a time each time a product is sold and keeping this record for a predetermined number of days so that information on which products and how many cups will be sold at what time zone of the day are estimated based on the sales information.
However, since sales estimates are made by each automatic vending machine in the above technology of the prior art, the prior art has a problem such that sales which is the primary operation of the automatic vending machine is interfered because of the large burden of processing the data. Further, since it is necessary to store a huge volume of sales information for making sales estimates for each of a wide variety of products, a large-capacity memory is required for each automatic vending machine, thereby boosting costs.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to solve the above problem, lighten the processing burden of each automatic vending machine for sales estimates and eliminate the need for a large-capacity memory.
DISCLOSURE OF THE INVENTION
To solve the above problem, in the sales management method for automatic vending machines of the present invention, a shared center computer processes information obtained from each automatic vending machine to make sales estimates for each automatic vending machine so that each automatic vending machine can start required sales preparations based on the sales estimates.
Furthermore, the center computer processes at least one among weather forecast information, sales environment information and sales information of a plurality of automatic vending machines to make sales estimates for each automatic vending machine.
In addition, the sales estimates are suitably corrected for each automatic vending machine based on the latest sales environment information before the time of starting sales preparations obtained from sales estimates of the center computer to start required sales preparations.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing the configuration of an apparatus. FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram showing the internal configuration of an automatic vending machine. FIG. 3 is a diagram for explaining information communication between an automatic vending machine and a center computer. FIG. 4 is a flow chart for estimating sales volume.
BEST MODE FOR CARRYING OUT THE INVENTION
Preferred embodiments of the present invention are described in detail hereinafter with reference to the accompanying drawings.
FIG. 1 is a system diagram of a sales management method
REFERENCES:
patent: 5339250 (1994-08-01), Durbin
patent: 5608643 (1997-03-01), Wichter et al.
patent: 5615109 (1997-03-01), Eder
patent: 5765143 (1998-06-01), Sheldon et al.
patent: 5844808 (1998-12-01), Konsmo et al.
Kazimi Hani M.
MacDonald Allen R.
Sanyo Electric Co,. Ltd.
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