Vendmanager - Vending Simply Better. No Images? Click here April 2017 Issue Hi. It’s been a most fascinating month. In a very positive sense. Let me explain. In the last edition we were just getting ready for Vendex in the Midlands. The show was fantastically successful - and most enjoyable - for us. It was a delight to catch up both with clients longstanding and new, and with prospects we hope will be coming on board soon. Thank you to everyone we met. Simon Black at NAMA, Las Vegas 2017 And now, I am just back from the NAMA show in Las Vegas - I went to research the sector and the market, to see what we can learn from North America to the benefit of our clients here in the UK. The visit was both exciting and reassuring. I’ll explain why below. The coincidence of the two events coming so close together, combined with some time to pull my thoughts together while not sleeping on the plane back, led me to reflect on where we are and where we are going - with highlights from both Vendex and NAMA featuring large. Adoption of Technology At Vendex we saw a UK sector where most are eager to progress apace with management systems, telemetry, payment systems, and the like to deliver commercial benefits. And in Vegas I had insights into where this may lead. Whether it’s because of the challenges of such a vast territory - the market is larger and yet more homogenous - centred around large conurbations far apart, or whether Americans are typically early adopters of technology (less restrained than us Europeans), it felt like data was already working hard right across the industry - to good advantage. But wherever I looked, from systems providers, to operators, to machine manufacturers and beyond, I did not see anything that surpassed the depth and quality of what we are doing here with Vendmanager. I was both delighted by what we have achieved, and excited by what looks like the road ahead here too: greater market penetration, leveraging the returns to our clients. Payment Systems and Data from All Machines After celebrating the ongoing UK acceleration in uptake of payment systems at Vendex, NAMA gave a taste of what the next stage of adoption will look like, bringing more machines online as well as offering end-users greater convenience. We have long been vocal proponents of payment systems (we love the data that they bring onboard). We already felt confident that this is the way the industry will go here, so I felt vindicated by what I saw in Vegas. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that we are doing a much better job here accommodating the legacy estate - extracting data from machines that don’t yet (and probably never will) have payment systems. And the benefits for our clients are that they can keep an eye on a greater proportion of the full estate. I was both surprised and proud to find this out: in our promotional material we talk about “no machine left behind.” Vendmanager Integrates with Major Payment Systems Quantified Benefits Another surprise came in what I saw at NAMA in terms of quantified benefits for vending management systems. My preconceptions were that the USA would be very strong on this front - in other sectors, American advertising often claims tangible results assertively. But not so in vending. There were a few statements of benefits, but they were pretty generic. Vague even. Compare that with the infographic that we displayed prominently for Vendmanager at Vendex. Rather than learning from the American market on this front, I found that they were keen to hear about our own quantified commitments to our clients, as set out in the infographic. Each of these statements is evidenced by hard work: backed up by diligent assessments to quantify the return on investment for our clients. Quantified Commitments from Vendmanager - as promoted at Vendex Midlands 2017 Conclusions: the Best of Both Worlds It’s never easy to draw hard and fast conclusions, comparing different geographical markets. But my experience over the last month spanning Vendex and NAMA has inspired me still further for the future of vending management systems in the UK, and the benefits that our clients will enjoy: - we are likely to follow the USA with increasing implementation of such technology: it will be happening here too in due course - because uptake here to date has been slower, the vending management systems in the UK - especially Vendmanager - have developed further and needed to quantify better the hard deliverables along their way to gaining acceptance - it’s akin to evolution: where the surrounding conditions are tougher, the harder struggle demands more from those who will prevail. Of course, I don’t have a crystal ball, or 20/20 foresight to help me predict the future.
Simon Black |