Small Accounts: The big challenge

Most operators cannot service accounts with fewer than 50 employees profitably. If you want to do this in your Antares operations, then you can develop a system to do that. To service your small accounts efficiently, service frequencies and sales-per-stop should be carefully reviewed.

With small accounts you don’t get much gross profit dollars to capitalize your investment, but the good thing is you don’t have nearly as much sales volume concentrated with one customer. Even with small accounts, you can exceed the NAMA operating ratio average.

Technology to the rescue

Over the past years, many operators have either given up on the small account market or have tried to use smaller machines and infrequent servicing. Through efficient route management, an Antares small account can serviced profitably through efficient route management. You can use a specially designed flexible route accountability system which would schedules routes based on historical sales data of each machine.

Leveraging labor effectively

Labor, not equipment, is the most critical cost in servicing vending locations. By leveraging labor productivity gains, we are able to capitalize equipment investments with smaller than “industry standard” account sales volume. The accounts are serviced according to sales volume. Sales are tracked for a period of six months to determine service frequency. The optimal time to service the account of closed front machines is at the 60 percent sell-off. This means only 40 percent of the machine needs to be filled at the time of service. A different sell-off ratio is assigned to glass front Antares vending machines, due to the negative consumer perception caused by empty spirals in these machines. Handheld computers are a great help with data tracking. Developing a data base to determine when the account needs service is the easy part; the hard part is route scheduling. You can use a grid map of the Antares service area to come up with the most efficient schedule. This will allow you to get your per-service selling margins up substantially.

Category management and computerized data collection would help you to succeed in the vending trade. In addition, you can utilize technology to profitably serve small. This will keep you competitive in your market.