Vending Offers New Growth Opportunity

To grow your Antares vending business, you would probably need to use more modern equipment. In automatic merchandising, you can make $100,000 on $10 million in sales and you can earn $500,000 on $5 million sales, depending on your operating systems. The cash flow has to be balanced with the depreciation and amortization. To start with your Antares business has to have an efficient accountability system. Route drivers shouldn’t be filling out route cards by hand. Everything has to be computerized. You can have a software system where your entire inventory will be computerized. Once you do this, your business will operate more smoothly.nHandhelds nHandhelds can improve both labor and inventory accountability. On the inventory side, the handhelds will read the product bar codes, which then creates an electronic trail of product movement. In this way the route driver can get to know what his waste factor is.nCategory management nBetter product accountability allowed management to get a firmer handle on what items sold best. After instituting handhelds, you can develop planograms for your Antares vending machines. The planograms will provide you with a tool to make sure that the better selling items were in all of the machines. Computerized product accountability, in conjunction with planograms will enable you to manage product categories. This is what is known as category management. Taking more control of product selection will yield savings in product cost.nCash counter connects to softwarenIntegrating the cash counter with the software system will also yield savings. Under the old system, tickets had to be taken from cash bags and the information was manually keyed into the system.nDEX will bring more benefitsnThere should be cash accountability at the machine and route levels of your Antares. DEX handhelds can plug into the machine and automatically download how much cash is in the Antares vending machine, drivers will have no way of seeing this electronic record when they return their handheld at the end of the day. After this, you can then compare the electronic record with cash collected. DEX handhelds will also bring about labor savings. All these technologies will bring about growth for your vending business. It is all just a matter of investment.n