How Category Management Works

Implementing category management in your Planet Antares vending business is ease, however it requires changes in your merchandising system. It also requires an organizational commitment to make it work. 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.

With the advent of glass front multi product machines like Planet Antares vending machines, there was tenfold increase in the SKUs that an operator had to 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. It is also a proven merchandising system that will maximize the product sales from your Planet Antares vending machines. This system will allow you to provide customers with the products they want, when they want them. This will of course increase your sales and profits by ensuring that you have only the top selling products in every machine, every day.

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. At the same time you will have maximum product variety through broad category representation and menu rotation. 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 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 space in machines for the fast moving items. As more consumers find the products that they want, there will be a greater consumer demand as a result of the increased variety.