Thursday, December 4, 2008

Optimal Product Mix For Your Vending Machines

Vending business owners need to ensure that they offer the most popular, in demand products through their vending machines. In short, you must develop an optimal product mix for your vending machines.

If some employees are responsible for filling of the vending machines, make sure that they place the right products in every vending machine. It is also important to keep rotating the products frequently to offer a large variety to the consumers. To accomplish all this, category management will be required.

In simple words, this is a system that simplifies product selection at the route and warehouse levels and also enables you to control the machine menu. Certain products may turn only quarterly and this costs the company in terms of tying up the warehouse space. That’s why category management is implemented by experienced Planet Antares vending operators.

Some vending operators hesitate in using category management because it needs a different way of selecting products from the traditional practice. The problem with the conventional product selection based on the prejudices of the owner or route driver is that it is costing the operators more in sales and profits.

Planet Antares vending operators, among others, must prefer using category management for product mix selection. This allows you to save in many aspects, like the following:

1. Higher profitability resulting in increased location sales

2. Lesser cash investment in inventory from a reduced number of stock keeping units in the warehouse

3. Greater labor efficiency and higher productivity

In order to ensure high sales for your Planet Antares vending business, select the fastest turning products. As the inventory level reduces, so will the amount of investment in fewer but faster turning products. Eventually, you will have to handle lower amount of items and face lesser burden of inventory.