By Jacob Wilson, Contributor
Supply chain management is an essential process in any industry, particularly so in the increasingly competitive hospitality sector where the success of every restaurant depends on its ability to maintain a stable supply chain and innovate solutions to build its competitive advantage. After all, the restaurant industry is constantly changing and evolving with rapid consumer trends. It’s why every restaurant operator’s priorities should be to monitor these trends, analyze the performance of their supply chain, and optimize it according to the demand and the market shifts.
This is your recipe for long-term success in this field; however, managing a restaurant’s supply chain is often easier said than done. In fact, it requires you to employ several key solutions in order to build a truly cost-effective supply chain. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the five key tips that will help you maintain and improve your restaurant’s supply chain.
Manage Your Restaurant’s Suppliers & Expand Your Network
First things first: A restaurant can’t hope to stay afloat without its suppliers. This is why successful supply chain management begins with your restaurant’s vendors and your supply strategy. It’s imperative that you nurture your relationships with your key suppliers, but also that you expand your strategy to establish relationships with new suppliers and supplementary vendors.
For example, you can’t allow your own supply chain to suffer just because one of your suppliers is unable to deliver the goods in time, or if they’re out of goods altogether – which is why you need to have a backup supplier ready to take on the workload.
Secondly, when you establish connections with supplementary suppliers, you are effectively setting the stage for stable and efficient growth down the line. As your restaurant business starts to grow, and when you start franchising across the country, your demands will rise as a result, so you will need to have more suppliers strategically placed in different cities and states that will be able to supply every franchise and support your growth.
Focus Heavily on Menu Engineering
If you have been in the restaurant business for any amount of time, then you have probably heard about, and had direct contact with the challenge of menu engineering. Building a menu doesn’t just boil down to the theme of your restaurant and your brand’s identity, or even what you might think your patrons would like. Instead, devising a winning menu is all about profitability, which is the fundamental pillar of menu engineering.
If you want to optimize your supply chain, then you have to engineer your menu through recipe modeling. Recipe modeling will tell you which ingredients are necessary for every dish (allowing you to order them in bulk at a discount, for example). It also allows you to predict usage amounts, and most importantly, it will allow you to determine the overall profitability of your menu. This will eliminate costly trial and error, and it will make supply chain management more efficient and effective.
Prioritize Restaurant Inventory Management & Optimization
Every restaurant has an inventory, either on site or in a remote location, which allows the staff to quickly fetch everything from new table cloths and napkins to those key ingredients that the chefs need to make the amazing dishes on your menu. It should go without saying that inventory management should be your top priority if you are to maintain a cost-effective supply chain, but also to run a cost-effective restaurant business as a whole.
For this reason, business leaders are nowadays implementing comprehensive inventory management software like ERPAG that allow them to manage and optimize every process in their inventory department, in order to automate reordering from suppliers and other key tasks, monitor inventory status in real time, and minimize human error as much as possible. This will prevent costly setbacks and ultimately keep your patrons happy, so make sure to use technology to manage your inventory more efficiently.
Integrate a Comprehensive Restaurant PoS System
A modern PoS system can save you a lot of money in your front-end and back-end operations, meaning that it can help automate many processes such as payments and ordering in the restaurant. It also can aid with reordering and payment management when you’re managing your supply chain. Point of sale systems integrate a variety of handy features that every growth-oriented restaurant should have, especially if financial savings is one of your top priorities.
Invest Time & Effort in Demand Sensing
And finally, in the ever-changing restaurant sector, it’s more important than ever before to senses the demand for certain products, ingredients, and dishes so that you can optimize your supply chain for minimal financial waste. Be sure to leverage the data and reports generated by your inventory management software and your PoS tools to sense the demand for different types of goods and even the demand for your brand and restaurant type. This will allow you to adapt your strategies quickly and retain your competitive edge in your market.
Wrapping Up
Running a restaurant is a cumbersome task in the competitive market, and maintaining an efficient supply chain can sometimes seem like an insurmountable challenge. In reality, though, you will be able to build a better supply chain for your restaurant business by simply implementing these key solutions into your growth strategy.
About the Author
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.
