Category Management Improves Route Productivity

Decades ago, vending operators that used to run nine-column candy machines, allocated four or five of those columns to best selling branded confections that would be offered in every location. The remaining slots were left available for items that are chosen by the route driver to meet particular location preferences. Vending warehouses inventoried about 15 products, stock keeping units (SKUs) to give those drivers a good variety of options.

The advent of glass front multi product machines like Planet Antares vending machines has led to a tenfold increase in the SKUs that an operator must warehouse. This has made it difficult for route drivers to remember and act upon specific location preferences.

Category management is a technique that was developed by the retail industry to take advantage of the continual flow of information from electronic cash registers to central computers. As the vending industry installs more sophisticated tools for collecting line item sales data from each machine in the field, these systems generate a similar flow of accurate sales data that can be applied to maximize the sales volume of your Planet Antares vending machine.

Category management will allow you to make periodic adjustments to menus in your Planet Antares vending machines, by replacing the slowest moving items with others that sell better. This technology also permits rationalizing inventories and reduction of total number of SKUs in the warehouse which would result in increase purchase efficiency and inventory turns.

The snacks and beverages in your Planet Antares vending machine can be analyzed into a manageable number of categories. Each location will include a certain percentage of purchases of each category. This means that you would need to make sure that items from each category are made available. The task of category management is to determine the relative popularity of categories and the number of items that are offered within each category. You can then adjust the sizes of the categories accordingly, depending on your sales.

The time is right for vending operators to get on board and reap the rewards of category management increased sales from an efficient variety in every machine. With this system, there will also be a dramatic reduction in potential sales lost because a product is out of stock and there will also be increased room in machines for the fast moving items.