“With Supy, everything is on one dashboard. Our teams are all on the same system and visibility is so much better for us.”

Overview

Namo is an Irish restaurant group running two concepts at once: Mexican food on one side, and Namo Plus, its bubble tea and coffee brand, on the other. One restaurant in Kilkenny has become eight locations across Ireland, with Athlone next.

The Mexican side is burritos, tacos and nachos. Namo Plus is the drinks, bubble tea, iced coffee, matcha and acai bowls. Two concepts under one roof means two sets of suppliers and two very different problems. Fresh food on short shelf lives, counted five times a week. And bubble tea that can’t be sourced in Ireland at all, shipping in from Asia months ahead.

As Namo grew, the systems underneath it didn’t. Production sat in one place, sales in another, wastage and portions somewhere else again. Every Monday someone spent the morning stitching the previous week back together by hand.

Challenge 1: Disconnected systems - everything measured, nothing connected

Supy solution: One dashboard connecting production, sales, wastage and portions.

The challenge: Namo had a different tool for every part of the operation. Nothing connected what the kitchen produced to what the shop sold. Wastage lived apart from portions. The Just Eat delivery business lived apart from both. Answering one question meant opening three systems and doing the maths yourself.

The Supy solution: Supy became the layer underneath the whole operation. Ethan, who sits on the commercial side of the business, opens one dashboard and sees production, consumption, wastage, portions and ordering together. When gross margin drifts in one shop, he can follow it down to the cause, whether that’s wastage or portion control, and have it corrected that day instead of discovering it the following Monday.

Impact

• One source of truth across all eight locations
• Kitchen production linked directly to shop sales
• No more cross-checking between systems that don’t speak

Challenge 2: Seven hours a day, spent looking backwards

Supy solution: Mobile stock takes, recorded by the people doing them.

The challenge: Monday mornings went on calculating the week that had already happened. Wastage, portions, production, all by hand. One person in the office could lose five, six, seven hours of a day to it. With a team this lean and eight shops to look after, that’s time the business needed back.

The Supy solution: Supy’s mobile app moved the work to the people already doing it. Every shop manager has Supy on their phone and records stock, wastage and orders as they happen, so nothing has to be retyped later. The office stopped rebuilding the week after the fact, and the hours that used to disappear into spreadsheets went back into opening shops.

Impact

• Hours back every week for a small office team
• Stock recorded where it’s counted, not retyped later
• Time moved off admin and onto growing the business

Challenge 3: Short shelf lives, long spreadsheets

Supy solution: Simultaneous stock takes on mobile, with a template for each day.

The challenge: Namo keeps its shelf lives deliberately short because the food is fresh, and not every supplier delivers on the same day. That means counting five times a week and ordering with real precision. On spreadsheets, at that frequency, something was always going to slip.

The Supy solution: Stock counts stopped being one person’s afternoon. One supervisor counts the walk-in while another counts the dry store, both on their phones, both selecting the template for that day of the week. The count finishes in a fraction of the time it used to take, and the ordering that depends on it stays precise enough to protect produce that only has a couple of days in it, whether that’s in Kilkenny or Clonmel.

Impact

• Five stock takes a week, without the spreadsheet overhead
• Supervisors counting different areas simultaneously
• Ordering precision held on short shelf-life product

Challenge 4: Stock that takes months to arrive

Supy solution: Live inventory with low stock alerts.

The challenge: You can’t source bubble tea in Ireland. Namo buys from suppliers abroad, much of it from Asia, and holds it in a central kitchen. Lead times were already long and getting longer, so running out wasn’t something you could fix in a week. And they usually found out a product had run out when it was already gone.

The Supy solution: Supy gave the central kitchen live inventory across the group. Stock updates as product moves out to the shops, and alerts fire when something is running low, early enough that an order placed in Asia still arrives before the shelf is empty. The bubble tea that can’t be bought in Ireland now gets ordered on data instead of memory.

Impact

• Live inventory across the central kitchen and every shop
• Low stock alerts before anything runs out
• Long international lead times planned for, not reacted to

Summary

Namo came to Supy as a fast-growing group running two concepts from one kitchen, with its operations spread across spreadsheets that could not talk to each other. With Supy, the team brought production, stock, ordering and food cost into one system, moved stock counts onto their phones, gained live visibility of gross margin in every shop, and got ahead of supply chains that stretch from Kilkenny to Asia. Three locations became eight, and opening the next one is a copy and paste.

As Ethan Butler puts it: “Supy was literally a copy and paste, add a new location, and we were ready to go.”