Profitable Small Planet Antares Vending Accounts

Many vending operators hold the belief that It is not possible 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. Efficient handling and servicing of small accounts requires careful reviewing of service frequency and sales-per-stop.

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. The NAMA operating ratio average can be exceeded even in case of smaller accounts.

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

You need to understand that the most critical cost in servicing vending machine locations is labor and not equipment. By leveraging labor productivity gains, you can capitalize equipment investments with smaller than “industry standard” account 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.

Data tracking can be easily performed through handheld computers. The easy part involves developing a database to determine when the account needs service while route scheduling is the hard part. For making 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.

In short, 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.