Which Is The Ideal Vending Machine Location?
The common factor among vending machine locators is that they all promise to provide the best and top quality vending location services. In such a situation, it becomes a tough task to choose a perfect vending locator service provider. At the same time, you must remember that the quality of the vending locations can enhance or reduce the potential for generating revenue of your Planet Antares vending business.
Basically, a vending locator should have the following key features:
• Ability to find suitable and safe vending machine locations
• Undertake thorough research while searching for vending locations
• Provision of vending machine maintenance
• Professional and skilled vending locators
• Offer of vending locator consulting
• Experienced personnel for good customer/technical support
• Capable of providing vending locator service for one or 100 machines
Once you have selected and hired a vending machine locator, they should chalk out a strategic plan keeping in mind the vending machines that need to be placed as well as your Planet Antares business requirements. Different types of vending machines are suited for different locations. This must also be kept in mind while choosing ideal locations.
When you have chosen the ideal locations for your vending machines and short listed the best options, the next step will be to call the location owners. These may include:
• Retailers
• Shop owners
• Hotel owners
• Salon owners
• Restaurant owners
Other than these, you can go for various types of locations that match your vending machines, products and the target audience. Find out if they are interested in having a vending machine placed in their premises.
Demonstrations can be given to those who are interested in installing vending machines on their locations. When you have finalized the deal, it is time to install the vending machines at the chosen locations. Your responsibility will also include regular servicing and maintenance of the equipment.
The Challenge Of Making Small Vending Accounts Profitable
In most cases, vending operators cannot service accounts with less than 50 employees profitably. If you want to do this in your Planet Antares vending business, in you will have to develop a system to do that. To service your small accounts effectively, you need to review the service frequencies and sales-per-stop carefully.
Smaller accounts do not offer as much gross profit in dollars to capitalize your investment as the larger accounts but the good thing is that you don’t have nearly as much sales volume concentrated with one customer. Even with small accounts, you can exceed the NAM operating ratio average.
In recent years, many vending operators have either given up on the small account market or tried to use smaller machines and infrequent servicing for them. It is possible to service a Planet Antares small vending account profitably through efficient route management. You can use a specially designed flexible route accountability system which will schedule routes based on historical sales data of each vending machine.
A critical factor to be considered while servicing vending locations is labor and not equipment. By leveraging labor productivity gains, we are able to capitalize equipment investments with smaller than “industry standard” account sales volume. The account servicing depends on the sales volume. To determine the service frequency, sales are tracked for a period of six months.
The optimal time to service the account of closed front machines is at the 60 percent sell-off. This implies that only 40 percent of the machine needs to be filled at the time of service. Glass front vending machines like Planet Antares vending machines are assigned a different sell-off ratio due to the negative consumer perception caused by empty spirals in these machines.
To track data, handheld computers have proven to be great tools. It is easy to develop a data base for determining when the account needs service while the hard part includes route scheduling. You can use a grid map of the Planet Antares service area to come up with the most efficient schedule. This will allow you to get your pre-service selling margins up by a substantial amount.
To succeed in vending operations, it is recommendable to use category management and undertake computerized data collection. In addition, you can utilize technology to profitably serve the smaller accounts.
