A Japanese developer of business technology related to unmanned shops said it has finalized a provisional agreement for its AI-based vending machine service for 100,000 vending machines.
600 Inc.'s Vending Hero fuses past sales data with feedback from route personnel to provide services that use AI to optimize vending machine columns, restocking numbers and route plans.
Prior to the agreement involving 100,000 vending machines, 600 said, a demonstration trial of more than 1,000 units was conducted at multiple sales offices for about one month.
According to 600, route operation work has conventionally involved considerable variation in quality between experienced and inexperienced route staff.
The Vending Hero service automatically proposes optimized sets for vending machine product columns, taking sales performance into consideration. This optimization of route visit scheduling and product columns reduces unnecessary route visits while reducing sales opportunity losses.
As a metric for measuring work efficiency, restocking number per unit visit recorded improvement of as much as 39% in the trial, with an average 24% improvement recorded overall in the restocking number per unit visit compared with the same month in the previous year. Even on a route that served as a model case with change in sold-out rate and other related metrics taken into account, an improvement rate of 30% was recorded.
600 will continue its efforts to make vending machine DX a reality through Vending Hero, and to contribute to the development of the industry as a whole.
