Salad Inventory Management System
Picadeli, which has over 1,500 salad bars in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, has chosen RELEX’s supply chain management system to handle its inventory management and replenishment. RELEX will support Picadeli’s rapid growth and the company’s vision to ensure customers always enjoy excellent availability, giving them the best choice of the freshest ingredients from a varied range.
Picadeli offers a self-service salad concept for grocery and convenience stores, whereby the customer decides the size of salad they want and picks the ingredients themselves. Because the concept’s success rests on offering customers the freshest ingredients and a versatile range, Picadeli searched for a replenishment and inventory management solution that minimizes waste while making sure that the right products are always available in each salad bar. Previously Picadeli’s inventory and replenishment management was largely run manually.
Inventory Management and Tracking: 7 Steps to Success
Inventory Management and Tracking: 7 Steps to Success
Inventory management and tracking can be tricky and time consuming, but taking the time to streamline your procedures ensures that every cent you spend is accounted for. With the help of the right tools and solid inventory management processes it’s easy to minimise costs, optimise your supply chain, reduce food waste and maximise your inventories’ return on investment. But how?
7 tips to get the most out of your inventory management system:
1. Prepare your point of sale to track your inventory
2. Prepare your staff (or yourself) for the inventory routine
3. Take stock of your surroundings
4. Create a schedule for manual stocktakes—and then follow it
5. Record waste (and why it happens)
6. Make sure inventory is up to date before taking deliveries
7. Obsess over your data
1. Prepare your point of sale to track inventory and streamline your supply chain
When it comes to managing inventory, preparation is key. The first step is making sure everything on your menu has been loaded into your POS system.
First up, you need to enter the key ingredients that go into your food. Yes, you may sell cheeseburgers and milkshakes, but that means you’re buying beef, cheese, salad, ice cream, milk… and the list goes on. Define the minimum levels you need of each ingredient, and associate them with your suppliers.
Adding your menu items comes second as they’ll be based on recipes using your ingredients. By doing it this way, the system can automatically update the quantity of any and all ingredients in each meal you sell, meaning you’ll never run low.
When stock needs replenishing, Lightspeed Purchase will let you know and even generate a purchase order to replenish supplies, ready for you to sign.
Always have the right amount of stock on hand
View live stock on hand reports
Streamline your supply chain – automate POs and keep suppliers in one place
POs sync to your accounting package for easy payments and reconciliation
2. Prepare your staff (or yourself) for the inventory routine
It’s important that there are dedicated people on your team who are in charge of inventory management. However, the rest of the team should also be aware of the procedures and expectations so they can support the process in their day to day tasks.
For best results, you’ll want two people taking the lead, as that helps to ensure accurate stock counts and reduces the chance of human error. A consistent approach is key; whoever’s handling inventory today should also be the one who handles it tomorrow and the next day.
Chef cooking food
3. Take stock of your surroundings
Now that you’re ready to go, you can start counting all the items you’ve currently got on hand. This is the first stocktake of the rest of your life, so you need to hit everything and make sure you have an accurate read on where you’re at.
You’ll be able to perform the stocktake right from Lightspeed’s system, so no need to whip out your pen and paper. Count everything that can be counted. Weigh everything that needs to be weighed. Update all the quantities and save the changes. Then, and this is really important, get someone else to do it again. When all your numbers are in agreement, congratulations! You’re done!
4. Create a schedule for manual stocktakes — and then follow it
The idea of a manual stocktake might seem like a waste of time if you’re using a system that’s automatically updating inventory with each purchase order and customer sale, but POs and sales don’t always tell the whole story when it comes to inventory.
Jars break, meat can spoil and meals can be sent back, so it’s important to check ingredients and verify assumptions to get a true picture of where you’re at – especially with your high cost items. Besides, your inventory data is valuable, long past the point where the inventory is consumed. When you stick to your schedule, you’ll have weeks, then months, then years of data to go back and analyse and use in your decision making.
Remember: The more you supply Lightspeed Purchase with regular, reliable data, the more insight you’ll get into your business and the more you can put your purchasing on autopilot.
5. Record waste (and why it happens)
Any time food gets deducted from your inventory, you should know the reason why. Most of the time, that reason is found in sales reports. But when food doesn’t get sold and still gets taken off the shelf? You need to know that, too.
As you do your manual stocktakes, don’t just toss out expired ingredients and update your inventory. Record the waste in the system, and note the reason. The same applies when something is spilt, or a customer sends something back. Lightspeed Purchase lets you to know the exact cost of your wastage and take action to minimise future waste and cut costs. How?
Easily record food wastage, who entered it and why
Inventory is automatically updated when wastage is recorded
Minimise waste by running reports to spot trends over time
Great inventory tracking isn’t just about knowing what you have on hand. When you know what you’ve wasted, you can put dollar signs to those losses and make sense of the impact. When you know why you’ve wasted, you can take measures to prevent it from happening again.
6. Make sure inventory is up to date before taking deliveries
Whenever you’re taking deliveries, make sure you’re starting from a freshly verified count. This prevents the possibility of confusion when adding new stock in with what’s already on the shelves, and ensures the information in the system is accurate.
Chef checking stock on a laptop
7. Obsess over your data
If you follow all these steps, you’re going to find that you’ve got a handle on the inventory in your business. This not only allows you to make informed decisions, but frees you up to focus on the rest of your ever-expanding to-do list.
You’ll be able to compare your usage with what you forecast and make adjustments to your purchasing accordingly. You’ll know what’s coming in, what’s on its way out, what was wasted, who wasted it—the list goes on. When you obsess over your data in real time, you’ll have a better idea of how your business operates, of what it costs you, and of ways to save money.
In fact, this inventory exercise as a whole gets you closer to your business. The flow of inventory from the delivery door, all the way to your customers’ stomachs, will become clear, and you’ll be armed with the data to keep it that way. Having good software is life changing, but you’ve got to commit to doing the work to keep it honest. The food in your kitchen is revenue waiting to happen, but it’s also an expense you’ve already paid for. Don’t overlook it.
Take control of your inventory management
Inventory management might not be the most exciting aspect of running a restaurant, but it’s one of the most important when it comes to cutting costs and staying financially efficient.
Lightspeed Purchase offers a solution for your inventory management woes, streamlining all elements of inventory management and supply chain – providing the tools and prompts to keep you on track. By taking the time to set up your system, you’re setting yourself up for success and making life a whole lot easier.
Picadeli decided to partner with RELEX to streamline its inventory management processes thus ensuring fresher, more versatile fast food options. RELEX gives Picadeli the support and flexibility needed to handle such a diverse range where it’s vital the products are always as fresh as possible. With RELEX Picadeli also gets a solution that adapts and expands with the company, something that is incredibly important as it experiences strong international growth.
We chose RELEX because it offered a flexible solution that can be configured around our current model and needs, and that can also easily be adapted to those we’ll have in the future
“We chose RELEX because it offered a flexible solution that can be configured around our current model and needs, and that can also easily be adapted to those we’ll have in the future,” says Ragnar Landin, CEO at Picadeli. “Combined with RELEX’s impressive knowledge of the fresh foods sector it has meant that we’ve quickly felt safe and secure with the solution.”
The goal is to work with RELEX to optimize Picadeli’s inventory and create automatic order proposals for replenishment for all its sales units.
“We are delighted to be collaborating with Picadeli,” says Mikael Wiklund, Sales Manager at RELEX. “This is one of the most enjoyable projects we’ve worked on. It’s very exciting to be playing a role in developing Picadeli’s unique and very successful concept, and it’s great to have a customer that has established itself in so many stores.”
About Picadeli
Picadeli offers a salad buffet concept to grocery and convenience stores where the customer chooses the content and amount. Picadeli provides an overall concept with a wide selection of products, salad counters, marketing campaigns and ongoing support/monitoring to shop.
The company was founded in 2009 and today their salad bars can be found in 1,500 stores across Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Picadeli is part of the Green Food Group and it employs 70 persons.
The leading innovator of cloud-based software solutions for the hospitality and retail industries, announced a new partnership with Michigan-based The Big Salad, a multiunit specialty salad restaurant and franchisor.
The Big Salad selected WhenToManage’s Web-based Inventory Management software because it offers broader capabilities than other providers, including an interface with food vendors, ability to fully integrate with the franchises’ HALO point-of-sale system, and enhanced data capabilities.
“Many of the inventory-management solutions in the marketplace do a good job at addressing one or two of our needs, but WhenToManage stood out for doing a great job at delivering all of our requirements, specifically integration with our vendors, integration with our POS system, and comprehensive data gathering and analysis,” says John Bornoty, CEO and founder of The Big Salad.
“While I’ve noticed that many franchisors fall short when it comes to providing franchisees with operational support, at The Big Salad we feel it’s critical to provide owners with turnkey operational tools to insure they achieve the best possible margins,” he adds.
WhenToManage’s Inventory Management solution is designed to make tedious management tasks simple and accurate.
It includes customizable “soup to nuts” options, such as: POS integration with major systems’ providers; integrated vendor and product databases; purchasing and invoice management; tracking of usage, variance, waste, and store-to-store transfers; yield management of items used in batch recipes or butchering; ingredients profiles for each menu item and recipe; analysis of usage trends and ordering suggestions; and much more.
WhenToManage’s Inventory Management solution works in tandem with its POS Intelligence and Employee Scheduling software for a complete operations package.
Bornoty loves the people-side of his business and enjoys spending as much time as possible with customers.
“As we deploy WhenToManage at the start of the new year, I anticipate having more time to spend in the front of the store because I’ll require less time in the back office,” Bornoty says. “I’m also excited about the opportunity to view operational data from all of our locations on one dashboard, enabling our team to identify and collaborate on issues and successes. This is vital as we prepare for national expansion.”
Franchises are a fast-growing segment for WhenToManage, as more and more owners look for advanced technology solutions for integrating operations across multiple locations, which, in many cases, use inconsistent POS systems.
“It’s very cool to see how easily our software can be deployed by franchises once they decide to focus on integrating their operations,” says Walker Thompson, director of sales and marketing, WhenToManage.
“Kudos to The Big Salad for having the foresight to get it right before their national roll-out,” he adds. “As a company that’s constantly working to advance technologies to simplify industry operations, we are very pleased to be working with The Big Salad, a company that’s striving to simplify operations for its franchises.”