Customer Case · Distributed Asset Audit

The Auditor Doesn't Look for the Cooler. The Cooler Announces Itself.

One of the world's three largest beverage companies, auditing coolers placed across thousands of third-party outlets. A proof of concept on 100 units, scoped toward 40,000 — with more than 500 people running the audit from their phones.

The cooler announces itself
The problem

Your Asset Is Inside Someone Else's Shop

A cooler is company property, placed on loan in a bar, a corner shop or a supermarket. It is expensive, it is branded, and for most of its life nobody from the company is standing next to it. Multiply that by tens of thousands of outlets and the register stops describing anything real.

The traditional answer is a person: a field auditor who visits, finds the unit, reads the serial number off a plate that may be scratched or hidden behind stock, and types it into a form. The method works and does not scale — and the errors it produces are invisible, because a mistyped serial looks exactly like a correct one.

The serial plate is the weak link
Scratched, painted over, behind crates, or on the back of a unit pushed against a wall. The audit fails at the identification step, before any data quality question arises.
Typing introduces silent error
A digit transposed produces a record that looks valid and points at nothing. Nobody finds out until a reconciliation months later.
Visit time is the real cost
With hundreds of auditors, minutes per unit multiply into a budget line — and most of those minutes are spent finding and reading, not assessing.
You cannot verify the auditor was there
A form can be filled anywhere. Proximity to the asset is the only evidence that the visit happened, and a typed serial does not provide it.
The approach

A Beacon on the Asset, and the Phone Already in the Auditor's Pocket

Each unit carries a BLE beacon. The auditor's app listens continuously, so walking into the outlet is enough for the nearby assets to appear on screen, already identified. No serial to find, no plate to read, no field to type.

Identification is automatic
The beacon transmits an identity the app resolves against the register. The unit is recognised before the auditor has looked at it.
Proximity is the evidence
Detecting the beacon requires being within metres of the asset — the visit proves itself, which a typed form never could.
No infrastructure at the outlet
Nothing is installed in the shop. The reader is the phone the auditor already carries, which is what makes 40,000 units across thousands of outlets even conceivable.
Works without a connection
Field audits happen in basements, backrooms and places with no signal. The app captures offline and syncs when the connection returns.
The audit becomes the assessment
With identification handled, the auditor's minutes go to the questions that need a person: condition, placement, whether it is stocked, whether it is even plugged in.
One register, many hands
Five hundred auditors feeding the same asset record, rather than five hundred spreadsheets that someone consolidates afterwards.
Why this scales and a scanner does not

Barcode and QR work well and cost almost nothing per asset. But they require line of sight — the auditor has to find the label, clear whatever is in front of it, and aim.

A beacon does not care that the unit is behind a stack of crates. In a controlled warehouse that difference is minor; in someone else's shop, where you do not decide how the space is arranged, it is the whole problem.

Scope

From 100 to 40,000

The proof of concept ran on 100 units — enough to test the mechanics in real outlets, small enough to change course cheaply. The programme it was scoping is four hundred times larger.

100
units in the proof of concept
40,000
units in the scoped programme
500+
auditors running the audit from their phones
Being clear about the figures

Those Are Numbers of Scope, Not Numbers of Saving

100, 40,000 and 500 describe the size of the problem and the shape of the answer. They are not efficiency gains, and we are not presenting them as such. A proof of concept establishes whether a method works at the scale it will have to work at — it does not produce a return figure, and one invented at this stage would not survive the first real deployment.

What a PoC on 100 units does settle is the mechanics: whether beacons survive the environment, whether detection is reliable when a unit is buried behind stock, whether an auditor with no training can walk in and get a usable list, and whether the offline sync holds when a whole field team is working at once.

Where this applies

Any Asset You Own and Do Not House

The pattern is not specific to beverages. It applies wherever a company places its own equipment inside premises it does not control — a freezer in a shop, a dispenser in an office, a machine in a customer's plant, a container in a partner's yard.

The shared difficulty is the same in all of them: you cannot install infrastructure at every location, and you cannot rely on the host to maintain your records. What you can do is give the asset a voice and put a listener in the pocket of whoever already visits.

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How long does one unit take to audit today?

Count the minutes from walking in to having the record saved — including the time spent finding the serial plate. Multiply by your fleet and your visit frequency. That figure is the one worth taking into a proof of concept, and you already have it.