History

Harvest had its beginnings in Peter's garage in 1990. For the first couple of years our development efforts focused on an alarm dialler that exploited the low cost and distance independent charging of the dial up X.25 network. In 1992 we successfully adapted this technology to monitoring Coca-Cola vending machines.

Also in 1992, with the garage getting increasingly crowded and the neighbours getting upset with the shipping containers we'd parked across the road, we moved out of Peter's garage into new premises in Norfolk Road. The Norfolk road site gave us plenty of room to expand and our building increased greatly in size over the following years.

In 1995 we started using analogue (AMPS) cells phones address the problem of Coke machines that were too hard to get telephone lines to. We soon realized that the higher unit cost of cellular units was offset by lower installation and maintenance costs. Before long we had switched production entirely to cellular units.

In 1999 with the imminent shutdown of the AMPS network in Australia and the falling price of GSM phones we started production of GSM based units.

In March 2000 the vending part of Harvest Electronics was sold to Marconi PLC and began trading as Marconi Online. By this stage we were monitoring 60,000 vending machines in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. In April 2003 Marconi Online was sold to Coca-Cola Amatil and now trades as Vending Management Services Ltd (VMSL).

Harvest continues to design and develop telemetry products for a variety of markets.

Some of our press, including this from the Wairarapa Times-Age.

Bill Gates, in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought, used the Harvest product as an example of rule #2 (Study Sales Data Online to Share Insights Easily)

"Making data digital from the start can trigger a whole range of positive events. The Coca-Cola Co. is collecting data directly from smart vending machines via cellular phones or infrared signals. A PC-based restocking program at the local bottler office analyzes the data and produces a delivery slip that tells drivers which products and locations need to get stocked the next day."