“I see your competitors are catching you up on innovation.”
That’s what a client said to me recently. I just smiled and replied,
“Our biggest innovation is invisible… but you’ll notice it when it really counts.” – Managing Director John Broderick
Six Weeks Later
A communications mast went down for two days; with no signal or network connection, EPOS systems crashed, thousands of vending machines went offline, catering staff were writing receipts on post it notes – it was chaos across multiple sites.
An apology email landed in inboxes across the country, but it didn’t change the facts. Transactions weren’t going through, sales were being lost, service was disrupted and data was gone, except this wasn’t a cyber-attack.
While others scrambled to recover, Broderick’s and our tech partners at Coges, along with our trusted vending manufacturers Crane, Westomatic, and Coffetek, quietly observed as the invisible system I’d mentioned activated.
Pay4Vend, our bespoke vending app, took over. Being designed to run off Bluetooth, our AI-enabled failover mitigated all connectivity related issues, allowing customers to still purchase refreshments from our machines. No signal? No problem with Pay4Vend. Sales continued without interruption, machines faced zero downtime, and no data was lost.
The Client
The client was busy firefighting problems with other suppliers to even realise that their entire vending estate had continued running flawlessly. Because that’s what resilience looks like – not flashy, just quietly effective. And that’s what you get when you invest in real innovation, not just something that looks good in a pitch deck.
At Broderick’s, innovation isn’t about putting a sandwich in a smart fridge and calling it progress – it’s about making sure that sandwich can still be sold even when the entire payment network goes down. It’s about keeping service running smoothly, no matter what happens out of our control. That’s the power of machine learning, smart vending, and quietly brilliant engineering.
Because real innovation doesn’t always shout. Sometimes, it just works.
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