Poor cost control and data management was a factor behind 1,400 restaurants closing in the past year. Avoid their fate by making your stock, staff and inventory more manageable, even with multiple locations
According to a recent UHY Hacker Young report, 1,400 restaurant closed last year, an increase of 25% on the previous year. Part of the reason for the challenges faced by some of the biggest names in the industry is an inability to track stock, staff, order history or any kind of data.
Not knowing which locations were pulling their weight might even have cost some groups their solvency in some cases. True, tracking stock at any one restaurant location is hard, let alone three. Three times the inventory and staff are three times more information you could be profiting from if only you had a way to see the bigger picture.
How do I make things visible?
Start at recipe level. Most chefs know how much of this and how much of that constitutes a dish. If you know the price of each part of recipe costs, it is easy to calculate reasonable pricing and adjust it when the price of recipe parts go up. If the amount of milk goes up and you do not adjust pricing, you might be losing money on your ice cream, for example.
Why is this important?
As a manager, you are conditioned to see the numbers behind every business, so knowing how long a dish takes to serve and how much it earns exactly, this week or in the past six months, helps greatly with menu creation, cost and promotion planning.
All orders filled right
Let your guests order using an intuitive interface. They cannot get it wrong, and they order more if no one makes them order by standing around. In a while, you have a purchase history profile for every guest. Know what they like when they come in. Engage at will with promotions based on their behaviour and spend. Move away from the pay-9-get-10 coupon crowd. Inspire loyalty.
Why is this important?
Instead of walking around taking orders, the staff can serve guests better. They have time to answer questions about menu items. Guests are free to order or top up their orders and pay any way they like. Easy, fast, secure and transparent.
Scale it right
Starting out small is great, but once you open another location you want more control over your data. See the stock at every site, where it went, what went well, what went wrong. You can’t fix what you can’t see. Opportunities and pitfalls are equally invisible in inadequate reporting data.
Why is this important?
If one location sells a lot of a specific dish, and the other has a lot of ingredients for that dish on stock, you can just move it from one location to the other and sell it all. If all sites have trouble moving something, build a special offer or a package deal or add a new dish with the same ingredients to your menu. You can do what is necessary if you know what is going on.
Exactly what Bizzon does
Bizzon hospitality platform gives you a unique perspective and ability to work closely with your staff at all levels, due to complete data and reporting transparency of your restaurant. Stock, menu items prepared and served, best sellers, slow movers – Bizzon makes it all visible and provides valuable management insights end-to-end, supply to service, all integrated with ResDiary and Oracle PMS.
To try the Bizzon POS solution for yourself, visit the team at the upcoming Restaurant & Takeaway Innovation Expo (Stand F270) and request a demo.