Point of Use Vending Machines

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Electrical Wholesaling Giant Graybar has just announced a partnership with Vending Machine Maker SupplyPro of San Diego. First, we automated the manufacturing process, now we are automating the services behind the manufacturing process. The concept is simple – instead of paying a person to dispense consumable products why not use a “high tech candy machine”. The customer inserts a card to tell the machine which department needs the part and out it pops. No fuss, no muss…. Well at least in ideal conditions.

Sticking with our candy dispensing analogy, it doesn’t take many trips to gum ball machine to realize these things only work when they have the right mix of service. On a recent outing with my granddaughters I bought them a hand full of peanuts from an old time machine. They commented, "Grandpa these nuts taste terrible." Obviously, the machine had not been serviced in months and the peanuts were stale. Electrical products don’t get stale, but there are other considerations to be considered. Sometimes, this concept will work well – but as giant Graybar rushes the concept to market I can only imagine how many people will misapply the concept. And, just like we experienced with Integrated Supply of a decade ago, gold rush mentality causes distributors and their customers to do some irrational things.

Frank
SAN DIEGO & ST.LOUIS, Mar 13, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- SupplyPro, the premier provider of Point-of-Use (POU) inventory management solutions, today announced that Graybar has become an approved reseller of the SupplyPro vending solutions. Graybar, a leading distributor of electrical, communications and data networking products and provider of related supply chain management and logistics services, is dedicating sales and marketing resources to establish a vending program to serve the needs of its client-base.
"Graybar is setting a new bar for combining their services with our vending solutions," said David J. Simbari, President and CEO of SupplyPro, Inc. "Competition for gaining market share via vending services is at an all time high and the team at Graybar has stepped up to establish their own strong opportunity in this market. We look forward to providing support for their initiatives and creating a relationship that will benefit Graybar and their customers."
"Graybar was looking for a vending provider with a wide range of solutions, along with a great deal of implementation experience, and we have that with SupplyPro," said Graybar Vice President, Product Management Bob Siegel. "Their SupplyPort web-based data management engine and extensive integration capabilities will allow us to utilize vending transaction data to improve materials distribution visibility and efficiency, which should assist our customers in managing their equipment costs."
Graybar and SupplyPro will be co-presenting SupplyPro's suite of vending solutions at the upcoming Maintenance and Reliability Technology Summit (MARTS) 2012 at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare hotel in Rosemont, IL on March 13-14, 2012.
You can see the SupplyPro vending solution set offered by Graybar here. 

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