Are you on top of your stock?
How to use stock management to track and reduce wastage, improve efficiency and increase profit growth across your stock cycles.
Many hospitality operators across restaurants, pubs and bars as well as hotels, recognise the importance of efficient stock control and the impact this can have on profitability. Whilst recognising this is important, to ensure you are getting real value from your stock control, it’s also vital to ensure you have a complete understanding of how effective stock management can work to positively impact your profit. To achieve this, you need to understand the full spectrum of its capabilities. Here we talk through the tools available for effective stock management and how they can work harder for you, your staff and your guests to optimise your inventory, deliver a less frictionless experience on both sides of the menu and enable you to achieve greater profit margins.
Live data and reporting
For stock management to play a valuable role in operations it needs to be both comprehensive and offer real-time monitoring and reporting. Not only should reporting include recipe and product costs, stock movement and variations between locations, orders and deliveries as well as wastage but it should also be live. That way, not only do you have an ongoing, forensic view of demand and consumption levels, but you are also then better informed and qualified to correctly forecast and plan future demand to reduce wastage, stock the right mix of products and in turn increase profit margins.
Up in the cloud
If your stock management dashboard isn’t yet hosted in the cloud then it is certainly not working for you as hard as it could be. Working alongside real time data insights and reporting, ensuring your stock management is accessible from the cloud across departments can support and deliver a full audit log. Any changes to items or prices can be made immediately for full visibility and accountability to ensure it is accurate 24/7 so that any ordering or menu decisions are fully informed.
Education and enhanced experience
Telling a guest an item is not available after they have requested it can be frustrating and disappointing for both staff and guests. To avoid such disappointment and enhance your guest experience, take the time to train your staff so they also have the visibility and knowledge they need on stock management to play an active role in adjusting recipes and menus as needed and likewise take the appropriate steps to inform guests as early as possible of any changes.
Efficient menu and recipe planning
Alongside profitability you can also achieve more environmentally sustainable and efficient recipe and menu plans. Monitoring more popular dishes can enable you to define stock ingredients more clearly. Likewise, up to the minute awareness of surplus stock can inform chefs and the F&B team to adjust menus and consider recipes that require multiple products to ensure where possible all ingredients are used and not left to waste in the stock cupboard. Again, live reporting has a critical role to play in understanding what and when produce can be used.
Crunch all the numbers
Just as a clear, live view on stock is critical for effective stock management so too is a clear view on the balance sheet and financials. Take the time to ensure you have a clear understanding of the costs and profit margin % of your stock. Certainly, keeping a watchful eye on stock levels and tracking against guest demand can enhance efficiency but monitoring all sales, voids, wastages and discounts across all your stock can give a true view of actual gross profit % to ensure there is no wastage on stocktake day.
To find out more about how Newbridge Software can support your stock management and profit margins please visit our website.