Operations
Fill Rate
Term from the vending glossary
Percentage of occupied product slots or capacity of a machine at the time of measurement. A fill rate below 30 % signals upcoming need for a restocking route; persistently high fill rate (>70 %) may indicate over-stocking or weak demand.
Fill Rate measures the percentage of capacity actually replenished during a service visit. A low value means: the driver visited, but the machine was still full — the visit incurred cost and achieved nothing.
As a control metric, it is therefore more useful than revenue per unit. It reveals where service frequency is too high, and it exposes the opposite problem: machines that run empty between visits and lose sales that go unrecorded as losses because they never reach the till.