Operations
Out-of-Service Time
Term from the vending glossary
Period during which a machine is unavailable due to malfunction, maintenance, or empty stock. Direct impact on revenue and customer satisfaction. Industry benchmark: out-of-service time below 2% of operating time is considered excellent.
Out of Service is the state in which a machine is present but not vending — empty, jammed, out of change, malfunctioning, or without payment connectivity. From the site's perspective, this looks like a switched-off machine, regardless of the cause.
The metric that counts is not the number of malfunctions, but the time to resolution. Telemetry reduces this because the alert no longer depends on someone calling in — the most common case is the customer who says nothing and won't return.