Servicing New Vending Accounts getting Organized  An interview with Larry Towner
Servicing New Vending Accounts Getting Organized  In the last video, Larry explained how to efficiently load a drink machine. In this video we’ll learn how to organize your truck for efficiency.

When at your warehouse (or Sams Club) or buying product for your accounts, how do you put them in your vehicle? Do you:
A. Throw the boxes in your truck helter skelter,
B. Open the boxes and throw them in your truck helter skelter, or
C. Arrange them in some kind of organized fashion.

Servicing New Vending Accounts Getting Organized is everything – your warehouse and vehicle – so you know where everything is located. We loaded our vehicles like we did our machines.

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Episode Transcript:

Tom Shivers: Servicing New Vending Accounts Getting Organized I’m Tom, with the Vending Business Show, here again with Larry Towner, where we’ve been talking about what to do when you land a new account in your vending operation. So last, we talked about to handle snack and drink machines. How to take care of those, stocking them and so now what’s next, Larry?

Larry Towner: Well this is kind of a combination deal. This is what you do before you go to service an account and what to do after you service account. This has to do … We’re gonna talk about how you handle your products, getting them in and out of your vehicles and in and out of your truck.

Larry Towner: Some of the things to think about, Tom, are that, again, we’ve talked about efficiency in the other segments that we did, and back to being efficient, you know. The only thing you really have is your time and we wanna be super, super efficient.

Larry Towner: So I have a question for you. When you’re at your warehouse or you’re at the Sam’s Club and you’re buying the product for your accounts, and you go to put ’em in your vehicle, how do you put ’em in? Do you, A, just throw them in helter-skelter, B, open all the packages and throw them all in helter-skelter, or C, put them in in some kind of an organized fashion?

Tom Shivers: Probably B. But I know that’s wrong.

Larry Towner: Yeah. Well. So here’s the deal right? The way that you would do that is … and I mention this ’cause you wanna be organized. Organization is everything. So when you purchase your products or you go to your warehouse if you have a warehouse, you wanna have your vehicle organized in such a way that you know where your products are. How you choose to do that is your business, but you need to have some sort of a system that organizes your products in a way that you understand, so that you can quickly access those products.

Larry Towner: We worked on a planner-gram, we’ll get into that. That’s an advanced vending concept, so we won’t talk about that right now, we won’t talk about that for some time yet in this series, but we worked on a planner-gram, and basically all our machines were the same. But we used to load our truck just like we loaded our machines, so everything was done by shelf and not so much by column, but definitely by shelf. So all of the shelves were the same, so that when we went to pick a product out of our truck or put product into our truck … it doesn’t matter, it’s one and the same … they went in into specific locations.

Larry Towner: So the top shelf items went in the top shelf, the middle shelf items went in the middle, bottom shelf items went in the bottom. That way … I’m a very simple person. I get confused easily. So if I have ’em all in the same way, very, very simple, the truck looked like the machines. Think that works, Tom?

Tom Shivers: That sounds like you’re cutting down on time there.

Larry Towner: Well we’re cutting down on the time ’cause we wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible. So when we would come out of the Sam’s Club or come out of our warehouse … didn’t matter really, was one and the same, they’re all a warehouse … loaded the truck up in that way, and then when we went in to go take our product into the account, came out in the same way.

Larry Towner: And so, critical thing, because you’re not gonna realize how much time you waste if you just walk out and throw the full boxes out into the truck, with no organization, you’re digging and you’re moving and you’re doing this and you’re doing that and you’re moving it. Now, I mentioned that option B, the one you selected, was you open the boxes and just threw everything into the truck. When you go into the account, and you come out of the account, what do you have? You have a lot of open boxes with partial product in it, right?

Tom Shivers: Right.

Larry Towner: ‘Cause you don’t put the whole box out there all the time. You think that’s true, or not?

Tom Shivers: No, probably not. Especially if you have a pick-list.

Larry Towner: Yeah. We talked about a pick-list in one of the previous shows. But you go in, if you take 48 Snickers candy bars in there, you’re not gonna put 48 into the machine. The chances are, unless it’s absolutely their favorite item, you’re not gonna do that.

Larry Towner: So if you just throw the half-full box into the truck when you get done, that box is gonna break open and you’re gonna have Snicker bars all over your truck. Or you’re gonna have bags of potato chips all over your truck. Again, been there, done that, don’t wanna do it again. Terrible waste of time having to pick product up off the floor of your vehicle.

Larry Towner: So have an organizational system for your vehicle. It’s your choice. There’s lots of ways to set your vehicles up. Just know where everything is. That’s what we’ve got for this segment.

Tom Shivers: Excellent stuff there again Larry. Tell us how people can contact you.

Larry Towner: They can get a hold of me, they can contact me at [email protected]. That’s the best way. Send me an email. ServiceGroupInternational, one word, @gmail.com.

Tom Shivers: Alright. And you’ve been watching Servicing New Vending Accounts Getting Organized at the Vending Business Show, a publication of A & M Equipment Sales.  Some other blogpost to check out Vending Machine License: Is It Something You Need?