The Challenge Of Small Planet Antares Vending Accounts

It is not possible for most vending machine operators to service accounts with fewer than 50 employees profitably. In order to do this in your Planet Antares operations, you can develop a system to do that. To service your small accounts efficiently, service frequency and sales-per-stop should be reviewed with care.

You don’t get much gross profit dollars to capitalize your investment, but the good thing is that you won’t have as much sales volume concentrated with a single customer. Even in case of smaller accounts, you can exceed the NAMA operating ratio average.

In the past few years, many operators have either given up on the small account market or tried to use smaller machines and less frequent servicing. Through efficient route management, a Planet Antares small account can be serviced in a profitable manner. A specially designed flexible route accountability system can be used to schedule routes based on historical sales data of each machine.

The most critical cost in servicing vending machine locations is labor and not equipment. You are able to capitalize equipment investments with smaller than “industry standard” account sales volume by leveraging labor productivity gains. The accounts are serviced as per the sales volume. Sales are tracked for a period of six months to determine service frequency.

Optimal time to service the account of closed front machines is at 60 percent sell-off. Thus, only 40 percent of the machine needs to be filled at the time of service. For Planet Antares glass front vending machines, a different sell-off ratio is assigned due to the negative consumer perception caused by empty spirals in these machines. Handheld computers are a great help with data tracking. The easy part involves developing a database to determine when the account needs service while route scheduling is the hard part. To chalk out an efficient schedule, you can use a grid map of the Planet Antares service area. This allows you to get your pre-service selling margins up substantially.

All in all, category management and computerized data collection will help you to succeed in the vending trade. Moreover, you can use technology to serve small accounts profitably.