If you’re losing the battle for control of your restaurant’s food inventory, your troops probably aren’t using a high-quality integrated back office system. It’s time for a change of tactics.
Here are the top five ways a centralized, web-based back office solution will help you win total control of inventory management.
1. Track everything better
You should know where your inventory levels are at all times. With the right BOH system, it’s possible to get real-time tracking of all inventory items at every single restaurant location. Zero in on any product, from procurement to consumption, with detailed tracking information—and capture food-waste metrics, too.
2. Integrate suppliers
Prevent inventory errors by integrating your inventory management solution with each supplier electronically via fax, email, FTP and EDI. Receive order confirmations, electronic invoices and electronic order guide updates in real-time.
Did you know that electronic integration with vendors also allows invoices to be imported and reconciled? This increases level accuracy and reduces a lot of administrative overhead.
3. Don’t waste the troop’s time
Speed up the inventory counting process (and even make it fun) by configuring your back office system for shelf-to-sheet counts. Look for back office systems that feature a useful mobile inventory application suite that can handle off-line inventory duties using existing Apple and Android devices.
Save even more time and optimize inventory levels with suggested ordering functionality. Here, the system generates suggested orders based on par levels, historical consumption patterns, sales forecasts, and on-hand inventory levels.
4. Eliminate rogue spending
Do you have “rogue” managers making unauthorized purchases? Eliminate this type of spending with centralized order guides. These smart guides ensure brand consistency by controlling the vendors, products and prices available to your restaurants. You’ll win the best price by centrally managing all bids, prices and contracts with electronic “apples-to-apples” vendor bid comparisons.
Go a step further and stop your stores from using different units of measure. By using configurable units of measure to normalize products across vendors, store locations and recipes, you’ll eliminate confusion and ensure accurate stock counting.
5. Get truthful reporting
Ditch the Excel spreadsheets already! With a restaurant back office system, either at the store or enterprise level, you can use inventory variance reports to zero in on large variances, view on-hand inventory values and gain an in-depth view of your suppliers’ performance fill-ratios, quality of service, product quality and price compliance.
Win the battle for inventory management once and for all! Want to learn more? Go to www.crunchtime.com, follow us on Twitter at @getcrunchtime or watch helpful videos at the CrunchTime! TV Channel.
This post is sponsored by CrunchTime! Information Systems