Every successful unattended retail business depends on tightly managed stock control.
Your ability to order, store, and supply machines with products has a profound impact on keeping operational expenses minimal while preventing losses due to understocked machines.
In this article, we’re going to explain how real-time telemetry devices enable smarter stock control and set up vending operators for success.
What is Real-time Telemetry?
Before we get into the details of effective stock management, let’s first explain the foundational concept.
Real-time telemetry is an IoT-based technology that transmits live data from vending machines to a centralized cloud-based platform.
Data such as machine status, transaction data, analytics, and stock levels.
When you have access to that kind of data, you’re able to make far better everyday decisions.
More advanced VMS platforms combine volumes of machine data with sophisticated AI algorithms to give operators actionable suggestions that drastically reduce costs, with stock control as a prime example.
Here is how real-time telemetry powers effective stock control for vending operations:
1. Predictive Restocking Instead of Static Reorders
Your success as a vending machine operator depends on more than your ability to fill machines with drinks and snacks. You need to consistently track which products are going through your storage and predict what you’ll need to order in the foreseeable future to avoid stock-outs or paying higher prices.
In order to do predictive restocking, you need to do two things:
- Track sales data from your machines in every location to understand how much product you’re moving every week.
- Track warehouse data to understand which products will have to be restocked soon, as well as their expiration dates.
Without real-time telemetry, you’d have to manually match your machine DTS data with the stock levels from your central warehouse software to get a rough estimate of how many products you’re going to need.
Instead, with real-time telemetry, the inventory data from your warehouse and vending machines is paired with transaction data and fed into the same cloud platform.
This allows you to accurately tell:
- How fast are your vending machines selling products?
- What are their stock levels in real-time?
- What are the inventory levels in your warehouse?
- Which machines need to be urgently restocked?
Televend’s Operations Management collects and processes all these data points to accurately predict sales for the upcoming period.
With the Purchase Center module, you can predict the amounts of products you’ll need and order them.
Being able to accurately predict your sales and adjust your order and pricing is key if you want to make your vending business recession-proof.
2. Elimination of Manual Stocking Errors
One of the main problems of doing inventory management with outdated tracking techniques is dealing with constant errors.
According to data from the National Retail Association, administrative errors account for 21% of all shrinkage losses in retail. When employees incorrectly count stock, make data-entry errors, or mislabel foods and perishables, it creates a disparity between the actual and reported counts of products in storage.
Vending machine operations are also sensitive to manual errors because stock management involves 3 phases: stocking the warehouse, managing stock in fillers’ vehicles, and maintaining product inventory in vending machines.
Each of these phases can be secured with the right combination of digital tools and real-time telemetry devices.
Televend’s Warehouse module is a part of the VMS.
Warehouse connects with other key modules and allows you to track products from the moment they arrive in crates to when they’re loaded on the spirals in your machines.
Once you have a scheduled refill route, the Pick and Pack app will automatically tell your staff which items to pack for a designated machine on the route. The Warehouse module will tie specific products to a van on a route.
The machine fillers will use the Staff app to check every machine they visit, and the stock will automatically be checked out of the van.
By logging in to Televend Warehouse, you can see your stock and vans in real time.
This is how to eliminate manual stocking errors at any phase.
3. Real-time Telemetry Enables Prektting
Prekitting is a stocking technique used by skilled vending operators that involves loading products for specific vending machines in advance into kits, so the filler can be as efficient as possible during a trip.
For instance, if a specific combo machine needs 8 bars of KitKat, 11 bottles of water, 9 bags of chips, and 6 bars of Snickers, all of these products will be packed and prepped for the machine, so the filler doesn’t have to mix and match products once they get to the location.
This directly eliminates the need for fillers to go back and forth between the machine and the van.
More importantly, prekitting removes the cognitive load a filler experiences when visiting dozens of machines on their daily route. This contributes to fewer errors and quicker loading times.
According to a 2024 market report published by Vending Market Watch, 69% of surveyed vending operators claim prekitting is a great investment in terms of ROI, with cashless payment systems (91%) and VMS implementation (81%) being ahead.
If you’re managing a medium or large fleet of machines, efficient stocking becomes difficult and expensive.
Prekitting directly solves this issue.
Real-time telemetry devices track inventory levels in machines, so your staff can instantly identify which machines are nearing stock-outs and need urgent refills, and factor this into route planning.
You’re finally able to streamline all your warehousing processes, prepare exact products for every spiral, reduce the time it takes to deliver and fill your goods, and reduce the weight of delivery van loads, which lowers fuel costs per trip.
4. Order Only from Sellers with the Best Prices
A central aspect of effective stock control is your ability to track the cost of supplying your warehouse with goods.
Because of the current political and economic landscape, it’s nearly impossible to predict how much a box of your top-selling candy bars is going to cost.
What might be the most affordable supplier today can be an expensive option tomorrow.
Along with the rising fuel costs, this will undoubtedly hurt your profit margins.
That’s why you should track the retail costs of all your products as part of your stock control.
If a brand’s order price increases significantly at a specific retailer, it’s best to find a retailer with better pricing or replace the product with an alternative that leaves you with more profitable margins.
Traditional vending operators use Excel spreadsheets alongside their accounting software and machine DTS data to track the cost of each product order.
They buy goods from the same supplier and increase costs on their machines if prices go up.
Finding a more affordable supplier is frowned upon, as researching prices and switching suppliers takes time and is considered disruptive.
This approach is ineffective.
Real-time telemetry devices send you detailed transaction data, including which products were sold, in what quantities, and on which machine, and connect that data to your sales and warehouse systems.
This gives you direct insight into what to order for your machines.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Since Televend’s real-time telemetry data is connected with the Purchase Center, you can configure the price lists of every vendor. The attached price lists are also configurable by packaging, delivery periods, and quantities.
This allows you to easily compare purchase prices between vendors before making an order.
You can switch suppliers with greater flexibility while maintaining consistent stock control without disruptions.
Conclusion
The bigger your vending operation gets, the more important it becomes to be effective in managing your warehouse, product orders, and machine refills.
Gone are the days when vending operators had to overstock on items and track everything with historical data and spreadsheets.
By installing real-time telemetry devices in your vending machine fleet, your entire stock control will experience operational uplift, drastically reducing your monthly costs and making your team more effective than before.
You’ll be able to:
- Transition to predictive restocking instead of static re-orders
- Eliminate errors caused by manual stocking.
- Start prekitting for refill routes.
- Easily switch between product suppliers with the best pricing.
If you want to see what our real-time telemetry and payment solutions can do for your vending operation, contact us here, and we’ll set up a demo session you won’t forget.