Manage your material costs efficiently with an ERP
April 13 2022
As a catering group, you manage restaurants or laboratories on different sites on a daily basis. It is difficult to control what happens there in order to :
- reproduce the same meal quality everywhere
- measure the differences between theoretical and actual consumption and reduce losses.
What if you could control your foodcost to increase your gross margin?
Discover with our experts the advantages of an ERP for production management.
Manage your data sheets easily
Using an ERP on a daily basis allows you to standardise your production. You can share a library of technical data sheets for producing meals with all your establishments in real time.
These technical sheets, tools for the R&D and Marketing departments, are a theoretical recipe that chefs must follow to guarantee the reproduction of the recipe in their establishments. Chefs have access to a lot of information such as ingredients, quantities, allergens and nutritional data.
The aim is to ensure that the quality of the meals served in all your establishments is consistent, so that your guests eat the same hamburger whether they go to your restaurant in Lyon or in Paris.
These standardised technical sheets also allow you to control the gross margin of your establishments by defining the quantity of raw materials to be used by the kitchen teams (e.g. 150g minced steak, 3 slices of tomato, etc.).
Each establishment remains flexible in terms of purchasing and can buy from different suppliers, once the quality of the products to be used for the recipe has been defined.
An ERP also allows you to add value to your technical sheets: the tool instantly calculates an AWP (Average Weighted Price) for each sheet, including those with products in stock. In this way, you can easily monitor and optimise your WAP, and therefore your margin.
Make sales forecasts thanks to your historical data
The ERP must be seen and used by commercial catering professionals as a business forecasting tool. Based on your sales history, it allows you to forecast future sales. It is also possible to take into account the weather, consumer trends, calendar and sporting events.
The software then provides you with an expression of need, for a given period (for example a week). First, it indicates the potential turnover, then it indicates the goods requirements (by FT, by product). Finally, it calculates the quantity to be ordered by deducting your stocks and the products on order.
For catering professionals, the ERP will be used differently. We will take into account the menu cycle, the take rate per dish and the forecasted number of staff to make advanced forecasts and manage your production chain.
In any case, we advise you to choose a tool with a sufficiently long historical period, between two and three years, for an optimal forecast.
Do you want to streamline your meal production? Contact us now for a personalised demo of our solution.
