According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), nearly 14% of food around the world (valued at $400B!) is lost per year as it makes its way from harvest to retail. For whatever’s left at the retail level, nearly 17% of food is wasted due to several reasons. One of these is poor inventory management.
Clearly, effective inventory management is a critical function for many high-volume restaurants. It’s not uncommon for inefficient inventory practices to lead to either stockouts or excess, both of which harm operational efficiency.
Here’s where inventory management solutions come into play. Many tools in the restaurant management market offer advanced ways to integrate your data in real time and thus forecast your restaurant’s needs, track your usage patterns, and optimize your purchasing decisions. Not only does this reduce your waste footprint, but it also ensures the availability of stock, hence contributing to better customer satisfaction.
In this blog, we’ll explore how adopting automated inventory systems can help high-volume restaurants streamline their operations, cut costs, and reduce waste – all while maintaining a sustainable approach to food management! Read on for more.
Many high-volume restaurants face unique inventory challenges due to the sheer scale of their operations. These restaurants manage large quantities of food products across multiple locations, requiring precise and continuous inventory oversight. Here are some of the main factors that influence the inventory needs of such restaurants:
In such an environment, poor inventory management can have dire financial implications. For instance, by over-ordering your ingredients, you may find yourself with lots of excess stock–much of which may spoil, contributing to food waste and unnecessary costs. Conversely, under-ordering can result in stockouts, leading to missed sales opportunities, dissatisfied customers, and operational disruption.
With real-time inventory tracking, high-volume restaurants can achieve a whole range of benefits.
This technology also supports better decision-making by providing up-to-date data for demand forecasting and order adjustments.
According to Modern Restaurant Management, IoT-enabled devices like smart shelves and RFID tags play a critical role in the real-time tracking process. Here’s how modern inventory management technology is designed to help:
By leveraging such tools, restaurants can get more transparency into the inventory process, thus ensuring compliance with safety standards and improving their overall customer satisfaction. As technology continues to advance, expect to incorporate tools like predictive analytics with real-time tracking to further manage inventory data.
In high-volume restaurants, it has become essential to learn how to properly forecast your demand. Predictive analytics can play a big role in this by analyzing your historical sales data and seasonal trends to accurately forecast demand.
Many advanced predictive analytics tools today allow restaurants to anticipate their customer demand based on past patterns and real-time data. Most of these tools will factor in variables such as the popularity of various items on your menu, your local weather conditions, and upcoming events in the area to make sure you’ve always got enough stock on hand to meet your expected sales criteria. This reduces the risk of overstocking or running out of key ingredients, directly impacting operational efficiency and profitability.
Restaurants can feed their historical sales data into restaurant management apps like Supy to identify their peak demand periods and slow days. By integrating this data with point-of-sale (POS) and inventory management systems, managers can make data-driven decisions about purchasing and stock replenishment. For instance, analyzing trends in beverage sales during the summer months can help guide the stocking of seasonal drinks.
Effective demand forecasting minimizes the amount of waste your restaurant produces and can even help you optimize your labor and storage costs. By installing an inventory management system, restaurants can adjust procurement schedules, reduce emergency orders, and ensure a consistent dining experience–all with a single click of a button!
One often overlooked means of optimizing your inventory is the establishment of strong supplier relationships. With an effective supplier collaboration, you can secure timely deliveries, control costs, and maintain product consistency in one fell swoop! Here’s how:
Many high-volume restaurants would prefer to negotiate favorable terms with their suppliers that allow them to access bulk discounts and flexible delivery schedules. The key here is to regularly evaluate your supplier’s performance—assessing things like the timeliness, accuracy, and quality of your deliveries. Open communication channels can further strengthen these relationships, allowing restaurants to quickly adapt to any supply chain disruptions.
Inventory management software plays a crucial role in streamlining collaborations with your supplier. With Supy, restaurants can integrate their inventory systems with suppliers, automate order suggestions based on real-time data, and reduce errors in stock replenishment. This integration ensures precision in procurement and minimizes waste.
Another important aspect of optimizing your inventory management is employee training and engagement. A well-trained staff is much less likely to make mistakes or create waste and is a great human resource to ensure smooth operations. Since your employees are on the front lines of inventory usage and tracking, staff buy-in is crucial to the success of your inventory practices.
First, your business should offer training programs that cover fundamental inventory management principles, such as the First-In, First-Out (FIFO) method, accurate data entry, and recognizing inventory discrepancies. These skills help employees maintain inventory accuracy and reduce food spoilage. Moreover, it’s vital that you add technology training to these programs, as familiarizing staff with inventory management software can significantly reduce the learning curve often presented by digital tools.
Engaging your employees is another way to keep things running smoothly. When your staff members understand how accurate inventory management impacts the restaurant’s profitability and customer satisfaction, they are more likely to take ownership of the process. Make room for regular communication and feedback sessions to foster a culture of accountability at work.
Since high-volume restaurants face a unique set of inventory challenges, advanced inventory management capabilities are crucial to maintaining efficiency and minimizing waste in these environments. Here are some of the key features you should look out for in your inventory management solutions:
Integration with POS Systems: Modern software is designed to sync seamlessly with your POS systems, ensuring real-time tracking of inventory usage and sales trends. This integration allows automatic adjustments to inventory levels after each transaction, reducing the risk of human error.
Low-Stock Alerts and Automated Ordering: Many tools will provide automated notifications when your stock levels hit a critical threshold. This allows managers to reorder items quickly and any disruptions to their kitchen operations.
Analytics and Forecasting: Many platforms will provide detailed analytics and historical data that allow you to make smart purchasing decisions by predicting your future inventory needs. These insights help restaurants control costs by accurately assessing ingredient usage and identifying waste.
Mobile Accessibility: Finally, the great majority of these platforms come with mobile-friendly interfaces that allow managers to track inventory and make adjustments from any location.
Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for high-volume inventory optimization in high-volume restaurants. Here are some essential KPIs to look out for in order to find areas your restaurant can improve:
Employing these KPIs effectively involves setting benchmarks and regularly reviewing your data on an ongoing basis. By monitoring these KPIs, high-volume restaurants can streamline their operations, enhance profitability, and deliver a consistent dining experience.
Supy offers several comprehensive services designed to help you in your journey to restaurant management. Here’s how Supy is designed to help:
Invoices & Settlements: Often considered one of the trickier aspects of managing a restaurant business, Supy allows restaurant leaders to accelerate their invoice recording processes, boost their inventory accuracy, and manage statements of account to stay in control of their payments at all times.
Visualize Each Location’s Stock Distribution & Value: Your inventory is the center of your operations. That’s why Supy’s decided to make it super easy for you to analyze your breakdown per item category! Create graphs of your inventory value split and the stock value distribution per item to present to the boss, just so they can see what a great job you’re doing!
Find & Fix Discrepancies: With this feature, you can monitor inventory levels at a glance, ensuring stock levels never go higher or lower than they should. This lets you identify any irregularities or discrepancies asap with Supy’s built-in alerting systems. With Supy’s inventory management feature, you can review the stock you have on hand, your stock value, and par levels all at once.
All Your Inventories in One Place: Effortlessly manage your kitchen and bar operations by keeping a close eye on the costs of your prized ingredients. With Supy’s inventory tracking feature, you can easily transfer goods between inventories online and assign a unique storage location to every item you create. Never let go of control over your stock levels again—Supy has your back!
It’s clear that inventory optimization is a critical strategy for high volume restaurants to enhance their profitability, reduce waste, and maintain operational efficiency. Through advanced inventory management solutions, restaurants can ensure real-time tracking of stock, minimize the risks of overstocking and stockouts, and streamline their ordering processes.
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Supy is the best restaurant inventory management software platform tailored for multi-branch restaurants and franchises. With features like real-time inventory tracking, smart procurement systems, and advanced analytics, Supy helps restaurants manage their various demands effectively and provides the tools restaurants need to thrive in a dynamic industry.
For the latest expert insights, download Supy’s ebook: The Ultimate Guide to Reducing Food Costs in Multi-Branch & Enterprise Restaurants.
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