The story of Summin

The story

Summin GmbH is a German-owned company that provides an order and pickup service for food items found in room service and restaurant menus. They offer digital menus for restaurants and hotels that ensures the customer contactless order and pay from their own personal device. The summin app is intended to eliminate waiting time with the use of tablets; here, the customer can order digitally and initiate payment from within app.

Jakob Hormann, the Managing Director at Summin GmbH, felt the need for an MDM solution at the early stage of the product development. They were rolling out a client app for their customers which was to be run on mobile devices and hence, they needed to ensure that the app remains active all the time. This required frequent monitoring of the battery level of the Android tablets. Jakob had to either implement this internally or use a service that accomplishes this functionality. After considerable research and discussions, the team decided to implement their services with the help of a mobile device management (MDM) solution.

Jakob tried out a popular solution but soon figured out that it was too complicated to deal with. After trying out Hexnode, he found that it was straightforward and easy to use which was exactly what he was looking for in an MDM solution. The user interface was easy to understand especially for someone who was totally new to an MDM. It also enabled him to use a lot of custom operations as things advanced pretty quickly. The implementation of Hexnode in their organization was comparatively simple procedure. The technical support was very capable of dealing with the entire process, which also lead to effortless implementation.

The team deployed tablets running their native app in Hexnode’s single app kiosk mode to make sure it is always open and displays the latest orders. Also, these Android tablets were connected to a Bluetooth printer which is used to print the receipt. The kiosk lockdown solution helped Jakob to lockdown the tablets to the required app. The ability of additional kiosk mode settings like Bluetooth controls and Disable volume buttons gave them a multifaceted lockdown solution. Here, the admin could set the volume of the device and this could not be changed by the user by pressing on the volume buttons.

Similarly, Jakob had enabled Hexnode’s battery level alert, wherein he could receive a notification whenever the battery level of the tablet dropped below the threshold set by the admin. The app could be updated even in the kiosk mode. Also, the remote view and control feature enabled Jakob to remotely view and control the screen of the device effectively. The real-time visibility helped Jakob to reduce the manpower needed to manually check and solve an issue. The device was scanned every hour to check its compliance and know if it has been offline for any amount of time. The extensive API functionality is another major factor that makes Jakob believe that he made the right choice with Hexnode. It is available as a RESTful JSON implementation where he could directly interact with the API using any HTTP client library. Jakob found Hexnode’s chat support to be his favourite out of all the tech support platforms. The exceptional help from the technical support team, which was quick to answer and left no question unresolved impressed Jakob.

In a nutshell

Hexnode was the simple and feature-rich solution that Jakob had been searching for. The technical support team proved to be invaluable as they were available throughout the implementation process. Jakob could ensure that the tablets were locked down in kiosk mode and could only be used for ordering food. With the excellent customer service and additional resources, the implementation of the product was very swift. Hexnode was truly the best choice for Summin GmbH and they would happily recommend the software to others in need.