The future of unattended retail is predictive, not reactive.
Running a vending machine operation becomes considerably more difficult as your fleet expands.
By the time you’re managing dozens of locations, you need to make sure all the machines are well-stocked and juggle multiple schedules for refills and maintenance.
This is the part where many vending operations break down:
- Not every refill route is worth the labor and fuel cost
- Mistakes become costly, resulting in longer machine service time
- Organizing machine fillers’ daily tasks requires planning
Thankfully, modern telemetry software solutions are here to cut operational inefficiencies and help operators scale their fleet.
After reading this article, you’ll understand the steps you need to take to transition from static to dynamic refill routes by deploying real-time telemetry software.
But first, let’s cover the basics.
What is the Difference Between Dynamic and Static Refill Routes?
The main difference between dynamic and static refill routes is that dynamic routes are planned on demand, whereas static routes follow a fixed schedule.
The majority of vending machine operators still rely on static routes.
They assign their staff members a list of locations to visit, irrespective of the machines’ real-time inventory levels, based on defined calendar dates or days of the week.
Because of this, machine fillers spend labor and fuel to reach locations that aren’t necessarily in need of immediate intervention.
When you have a list of 50+ locations, inefficiency losses add up and take a bigger bite out of your revenue.
On the other hand, dynamic routes have no fixed schedule.
Instead, they generate visit schedules on-demand.
Dynamic refill routes rely on predicting demand and consumption for your vending machines and using data to prioritize which machines to visit and in what order.
They also consider the contractual obligations you have towards different locations, so that you’re only spending resources on locations that require your attention.
Implementing this way of working eliminates unnecessary visits and saves resources that could otherwise be reinvested in your business.
For dynamic routes to work, the VMS you’re using needs to predict the future.
Well, maybe not predict the future, but accurately forecast sales trends for the next seven days using fresh, real-time data directly from your machine fleet.
VMS providers like Televend can process volumes of real-time vending machine data with sophisticated AI algorithms to accurately predict sales trends and product consumption weeks in advance.
Therefore, dynamic routes aren’t static routes paired with real-time data, since the quality of AI algorithms is the missing component that operators rely on accurately predict sales trends in vending machines.
Now that you understand the difference between static and dynamic routes, let’s talk about the process of transitioning to a better way of planning vending machine visits.
1. Install Telemetry Boxes in Your Vending Machine Fleet
Your VMS needs to collect a large enough data sample to predict future sales and product consumption trends as the basis for refill routes.
Before diving into the details of telemetry boxes, it’s important to understand the core concept.
Real-time telemetry is an IoT-powered technology that delivers live data from vending machines to a centralized cloud-based platform. This includes information such as machine status, transaction activity, analytics, and stock levels.
The process works through a device known as a telemetry box, which is installed inside the vending machine and connected to your VMS.
You see, most vending operators still rely on historic DTS data for route planning:
- The machines store various data groups locally, such as payment type, transaction time, and counter numbers.
- Machine fillers visit the machines and complete DTS readouts with handheld computers.
- Staff upload extracted data into the operator’s VMS.
- Management manually processes data and makes decisions based on historic records.
On the other hand, real-time telemetry devices automatically transfer relevant data into your VMS and help you make best week-by-week decisions.
Before installing a telemetry box in the machine, you first need to configure it in the Cloud by adding your machines and their payment systems.
According to data from Research and Markets, 58.1% of vending machines are currently connected with IoT and vending technology.
In addition, further data from Research Insights found that approximately 65% of newly manufactured vending machines come with fitted telemetry and IoT sensor technology.
The use of real-time data is already accepted as the modern standard in vending.
But the concept is still lacking without dynamic routes that plan visits on demand and account for the many moving parts typical for this industry.
With the right telemetry software, you can make your vending business recession-proof.
But we’re only scratching the tip of the iceberg.
2. Enter Product Planograms and Optimize Placement with Telemetry Software
Every experienced vending operator knows that how products are positioned inside a vending machine has a huge impact on sales.
A product planogram for vending is a visual layout showing exactly where products should be placed inside the spiral grid of a vending machine.
The British Food Journal published a research paper in 2020 that the way planograms are set up directly influences purchase decisions. The study analyzed over 27000 real-life transactions and found that optimized planograms encourage faster buying decisions and higher sales volume.
In the context of vending, most purchases are impulsive: a customer walks past your machine, sees an interesting product, and decides what to buy on the spot.
Understanding how planograms support sales and quantifying results is a missing link for predicting sales.
Once you can predict stockout dynamics of your vending machine fleet, you can generate on-demand refill routes that save money in fuel and labor costs.
In a traditional vending environment, operators would have to manually set up product planograms for each vending machine added to their VMS.
Besides the 30-minute setup time per machine, the reported planograms still don’t necessarily match the product mix and on-site placement.
And finally, if the VMS doesn’t track planograms relative to sales, you’re missing one of the most important data sources.
You can easily avoid this problem with excellent telemetry software.
For example, VendVision is developed so that fillers can easily create planograms within minutes by snapping a photo of the vending machine.
Televend’s AI algorithm will automatically generate the planogram based on the photograph the fillers took with the app. If the on-site product planogram differs from the reported planogram, it’s easy to spot the discrepancy and make the adjustment.
Then, the VMS can consider product positioning to estimate expected sales and suggest an optimized planogram to maximize potential sales.
3. Feed Your Telemetry Software with Operational and Sales Data for 30 Days
Every successful sales prediction model requires a sufficient data sample.
In this step, your goal is to log everything so your telemetry software can generate on-demand refill schedules. You’re already collecting two hugely important data sets:
- Real-time machine performance from your entire fleet with telemetry boxes
- Exact planograms per product and columns in every vending machine
Since you’re currently operating on static routes, you have to log every machine refill visit for 30 days.
This is enough for a strong predictive AI model to gather data to predict your sales one week in advance and lay the foundation for your dynamic refill vending routes.
According to data from Careertrainer, 84% of decision-makers in the retail sector are either implementing or expanding their AI operations.
Similarly, a scientific study published in 2025 found that machine learning and AI-based demand forecasting improve forecast accuracy by 10-50% compared with classical statistical methods.
The retail industry has quickly embraced the benefits of AI sales forecasting; it’s time for the unattended sector to adapt next.
4. Enter Contractual Rules and Visit Frequency
Operating vending machines is a unique business because you have to serve both customers (people who use your machines daily) and clients (location owners).
Regarding the latter, it’s common for vending operators to have different contracts with location owners that outline their obligations.
For example, these can include:
- Commission structure – how the income from a machine is split between the operator and the location owner
- Product control – if the vending machine operator is contractually obliged only to stock the machine with certain brands (for example, candy bars from Mars, Inc. like Snickers, Mars, Twix and M&Ms)
- Maintenance and servicing obligations – how often the operator is obliged to visit the machines for maintenance, cleaning and service
- Product restrictions – contract-specific restrictions for certain products (for example, no vapes in proximity to schools, healthy vending options, etc.)
Since contractual obligations need to be accounted for in route planning, your telemetry software should absolutely enable you to enter specific contracts for refill trips.
This allows you to automatically include them in your on-demand schedules.
In addition, telemetry software with a contract center can help you manage individual contracts and avoid overpaying commissions.
5. Transition Your Vending Operation to Prekitting
The final step of operational maturity is adopting prekitting for your refill routes.
Prekitting is the practice of packing only the necessary products in the warehouse before heading off on a refill run. Since drivers have pre-packed products allocated to each machine, they don’t have to decide what to load into the machine on the spot.
There are several major benefits to prekitting:
- Machine load time is considerably lowered.
- Refill routes require less fuel since vehicles are lighter.
- There are no ad-hoc refills; every single product goes exactly where it needs to.
Think of prekitting as a natural extension of dynamic routes.
Dynamic routes generate refill schedules on demand, making labor time and fuel spend more efficient than with static routes.
Prekitting also generates lists of needed products on demand to reduce load times, vehicle weight, and the number of errors that accumulate under poor warehouse management.
A report from the National Retail Federation found that 21% of retail shrinkage is due to administrative errors, miscounts, and data entry errors.
Retail shrinkage is the difference between recorded inventory and actual physical inventory.
In the vending industry, warehousing can be particularly challenging since you have a constant flow of products coming in and out of storage; many of whom have special storage requirements.
Without real-time visibility into a machine’s inventory, fillers have to pick more products than they need, which later must be returned to the warehouse.
On a route with dozens of machines, there’s plenty of space for errors or mismanagement that causes product shrinkage.
Thanks to telemetry software, prekitting directly solves most shrinkage problems that mid- and large-sized operators face.
- After a route is generated on demand, needed products are automatically reserved in the warehouse and packed into boxes or pallets. Every vending machine has an exact count of products.
- The product order is allocated directly to a specific van.
- When machine fillers visit and refill vending machines with the Staff app, the system instantly reduces stock from the van.
- In the Warehouse model, managers can see the stock of the central warehouse and in vehicles on routes.
Being able to create refill routes on demand and tie specific product orders to those routes is key to running a tight vending operation with no wasted fuel or labor time and no lost products.
From Static to Dynamic Refill Routes
Not all telemetry software is built the same.
Data from 360 Market Updates cites that 66% of global vending operators are implementing telemetry for inventory tracking and servicing.
If the software you’re using doesn’t allow you to use real-time data to automatically adapt your refill routes and warehouse, you’re not using the full potential of this technology.
Operators who can generate on-demand refill routes and add them to their weekly plans can service more machines without hiring additional staff.
This, in turn, allows them to expand their fleets and grow their businesses.
This is exactly what we did for Livewell, the UK-based vending machine operator. With our dynamic routes, they’ve eliminated 30% of unnecessary refill trips, which allowed their staff to service more machines.
On the other hand, operators who still rely on static refill routes continue to overspend on fuel and labor time, while their overhead costs grow.
The technology has long caught up with the operational needs of the vending operators.
Now all that’s left is to embrace a more effective way of working.