Adjusting To The Changing Vending Market

The changes in vending business have aroused a new wave of interest and opportunities for the players. Most of the Planet Antares operators agree that there is need for better inventory control and accountability measures. Previously, it was possible to offset pilferage and operating inefficiencies with gross profit.

Savings can be made through category management in which the number of stock keeping units (SKU) inventory is reduced. This will result in higher sales due to frequent product rotations and better choices of production systems.

Line item accounting can increase the ability of vending operators to manage product selections efficiently. This is a great opportunity for Antares vending operators to take advantage of and enhance business profitability through cost control.

It may require considerable amount of time and money to be invested in your Antares vending business to enable changes in technology and mechanisms in an appropriate manner. Teaching drivers to use handheld computers will be a good idea that will pay off in the long run. Even the product selection process becomes efficient after implementing such technology.

After setting up the systems, there is need for someone to manage the operating systems that support a category management program. This task will not require too many inputs and involves some ongoing tasks to maintain it. Appoint a manager to analyze the data regularly and decide the product selections. Also, the support work will depend on the planograms. These are commonly organized according to the machine configuration and/or types of locations.

Make sure that you keep track of the frequency and amount of changes in planograms to determine the level of support work required. There are different types of vending machine products – core and cycle. While the core products remain the same, cycle products keep changing according to customer demand and Market variations. Mostly, planograms are on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Don’t forget to undertake another support task that involves input of data in the system and combining it with outside data. In certain cases, databases provided by the product suppliers are also found helpful for Planet Antares vending operators. There are others who depend on internal data alone, unlike the operators who receive regular updates from computer software providers.

Still, many vending operators continue to choose product selection according to sales and not profitability. There are some systems that can offer estimates of profit on individual products but have yet to be adopted on a wide scale and gain popularity. This challenge remains to be overcome for many vending companies.

Most operators choose products based on sales, not profitability. Even though there are some systems that provide profit information on individual products, this aspect of the system has been more challenging.