Restocking, planograms and shrinkage

Operations is where vending programmes usually fail with a full warehouse. The mix looked clever in a meeting. The round looked short on a map. Then a bank holiday, a broken lift and a tray of yoghurt with a weekend date all arrived on the same Thursday. Labour is the scarce part. Design the week around that fact, then let the cabinet and the reader follow. If you are still choosing hardware, keep machine types and payments open beside this page.

This guide covers planograms, visit cadence, first-in first-out rotation, waste, shrinkage, records and the decision to remove a machine. It does not invent benchmark fill rates. Your sites will not share a number, and pretending they do is how empty spirals get ignored.

Planograms are a labour document

A planogram is not a mood board. It is a map of which SKU lives in which slot, at which maximum facing, with a substitute if that SKU is unavailable. Without it, every restocker becomes a merchandiser with a different theory, and your sales data describes personalities, not demand. Print the map, or load it in the handheld if you use one, and date it. When you change a slot, change the map in the same visit or you have two truths.

Build the mix from the site’s clock. Offices often want drinks early and snacks in the mid-afternoon. Night industrial sites want filling, salty food and caffeine more than premium chocolate. Leisure sites skew with weather. Start narrower than you think: a short list that stays in stock beats a long list with permanent holes. Holes teach customers not to trust the glass. Trust, once lost, does not return because you added another flavour of water.

Pack geometry belongs on the same page as flavour. If the spiral cannot vend the new pouch, it is not a product, it is a jam scheduled for Saturday. Test one facing before you commit a whole tray. Keep heavy items where the mechanism can take the impact, and keep short-life chilled items where the temperature is actually controlled, not where the shelf looks empty. Combo cabinets will try to lure you into mixing those rules. Do not.

Cadence, routing and the honest duration of a visit

Visit cadence should come from empty slots and expiry, not from a round that looks efficient on software. A drinks machine in a heatwave and an ambient snack machine in a quiet legal office should not share a rhythm just because they share a postcode. Telemetry can suggest when to go if someone believes the sensors; it cannot load the cage. Build routes that respect building access windows described in location planning. A “quick” machine behind two locked doors is not quick.

Time the visit properly: park, badge, trolley, open, rotate, fill, clean contact surfaces, test vend, cash if needed, lock, waste removal, notes. If your schedule only contains “fill”, you will skip dating and the machine will fail a hygiene look. Two extra minutes of rotation are cheaper than a complaint about an out-of-date sandwich. Put a standard visit card in the door pocket so a substitute restocker does not invent a process.

Expiry, waste and temperature as product care

First-in first-out is unfashionable only among people who have never thrown away a tray of unmarked pots. Date what you load. Pull what you would not sell to someone you work with. Chilled lines need a colder chain than a van dashboard in July. If you cannot keep that chain, do not sell that line. Ambient snacks forgive more, but chocolate still has a temperature opinion, and anything with an inflated bag or a split seal is waste, not a discount SKU.

Waste records are not paperwork for its own sake. They tell you which slots are theatrical. A product that expires in place is a planogram error or a cadence error. Either shrink the facing or visit sooner, or drop the SKU. Dumping waste in a client’s staff-room bin is a relationship error. Take it off site unless the contract says otherwise and the bin is actually suitable.

Shrinkage and keys

Shrinkage in vending is a blend of theft, unrecorded vends, counting error and “staff help themselves because the reader was down”. You will not separate those cleanly without a closed cabinet, a payment log and a fill log that use the same clock. Dual control of keys, a register of who had them, and a rule that doors are not left on the latch during a chat all sound severe until the first unexplained gap. Cashless reduces one class of loss and does not touch product walking out during an open-door restock. Face the glass toward people, not toward a blank wall, as the location guide argues.

Refunds need a path that is boring and documented: when the restocker may refund, when they must log a photo of a jammed slot, when the customer emails a central address. Informal refunds from the restocker’s pocket train the site to expect a person, not a machine. That does not scale, and it muddies shrinkage.

Records that survive a facilities audit

Keep a thin, consistent pack: planogram version, fill quantities, waste, temperature glance for chilled cabinets, payment incidents, and any faults left for a technician. Digital is fine if the person on the round will actually complete it; paper in a wet van is not automatically more honest. What matters is that a second person can reconstruct the last fortnight. Multi-site programmes die in the gaps between charismatic individuals.

When a machine cannot be kept full, cold or paid without heroic visits, remove it. Empty cabinets train the whole building to walk past every cabinet, including the ones that still work. Removing a machine is an operating skill. Agree notice, make good the floor, collect keys, and close the merchant device so it does not keep renting a ghost. Then write down why it failed — mix, site physics, labour, or payments — so the next brief is sharper. If the failure was hygiene or refrigeration, hand the lesson to maintenance rather than buying a bigger glass door.

Operations is not a back office. It is the product. Customers experience freshness, availability and a reader that works. Everything else is a means. If you want a critique of a route sketch or a planogram template, use the contact page. Bring the site clock and the trolley path, not just a photograph of the alcove.