A restaurant is a lot like a three-legged stool with each leg equally supporting its success. One leg is your customers, another leg is your operations, and the third leg is your partners. If all three aren’t strong, your entire business could be in jeopardy.
Let’s look at the partner leg. One of the most important partners a restaurant brand will have is their foodservice distributor, or broadliner. 
According to industry foodservice broadliner and market leader, Sysco, there are more than 16,500 companies engaged in the distribution of food and non-food products to the foodservice industry in the US (2014).
Sysco estimates that they serve about 17.7% of the approximately $264 billion annual foodservice market in the United States and Canada (2014), and the foodservice (food-away-from-home) market represents approximately 48% of the total dollars spent on food purchases made at the consumer level in the United States (2014).
With the importance of foodservice distribution partners in mind, below are few fantastic reasons why partnering with a restaurant back office solution that includes vendor management functionality can not only help restaurants save money on food costs, but can also help save time by simplifying the entire ordering and reconciliation process with their system or broadline distributor.
- Vendor Administration – Increase procure-to-pay cycle and reduce administrative overhead by driving all your vendors to a central collaboration portal to self-manage their order guides, payments and credits.
- Vendor Scorecards – By comparing each invoice and delivery experience to the original vendor order and contract terms, a quality BOH software system automatically creates scorecards that measure fill ratios, quality of service, product quality and contract compliance.
- Control Suppliers – Eliminate supplier overcharges and unapproved substitutions with order guide controls, automated exception alerts and quick credit recovery.
- Contract Audits – Gain real-time visibility to fill ratios, price compliance, substitutions, and service levels across vendors, products, regions, and restaurants.
- Simplify Bid Analysis – Automate vendor bid analysis through an electronic “apples-to-apples” bid analyzer to centrally select approved vendors, products, pack sizes, specifications, and prices.
- Electronic Integration with Vendors – Save time and increase accuracy with end-to-end electronic integration to all your suppliers for ordering, invoicing, order guide updates, and payment reconciliation.
- Normalize Units of Measure – Map specific vendor products and pack sizes to your master company product list to increase order and inventory accuracies and to normalize products across vendors.
- Increase Customer Safety and Satisfaction – Provide your customers with consistent food quality by centrally defining product specs and selecting dependable vendors across your enterprise.
If you want to learn more about how your brand can benefit from vendor management cost control tools by employing quality restaurant management software, reach out to CrunchTime and request an online demonstration.
This post is sponsored by CrunchTime! Information Systems