Reducing Delivery Trips for your Antares Business

One obvious way of lowering fuel costs for your Antares vending business, is to use less gas by reducing the number of deliveries. Doing this will make better use of the driver’s time and provides more value to the operator for the same wages and health care costs.

If you have not been optimizing your routes, let those rising costs be a catalyst to do it now! The best way is by looking at certain “metrics” for each Antares vending machine and then plan on updating both the Plano grams and delivery schedules.

A modern vending software system will make collecting and analyzing the appropriate metrics much easier. In spite of this, the job can still get done without one. Start by looking at the most recent services at each Antares vending machine and then consider the following metrics:

• Percent deleted – How empty was the Antares vending machine when the driver arrived to service it?
• Percent filled – How full was the machine when he left after servicing it?
• Number of sold out columns – The number of columns in the Antares vending machine that were sold out.
• Number of sold out products – The number of products (not columns) that have sold out.
• Value of dollar sales (even if not collected).

The goal in fine tuning schedules and Plano grams is to service the Antares vending machine when it is as depleted as possible with no sold out products. Usually there is a certain amount of sold out columns that may be acceptable because studies show that you will only “lose” the sale if the product a consumer wants is not available.

As if a 60 % increase in the cost of energy wasn’t damaging enough, operators are facing rising healthcare and labor costs and lower manufacturer rebates. All these factors together can seriously hurt profitability. Fortunately Antares vending operators can adopt the practice of reducing delivery trips, to mitigate the impact of rising costs and falling rebates.