There are only so many times restaurants can raise menu prices before they run out of customers willing to pay $50 for a steak or $18 for a cocktail, so chefs (and their suppliers) need to find efficiencies in their existing businesses if they want to increase their margins. One of the easiest –and most obvious – ways of doing this is, of course, to buy in bulk. The more you order, the more you save, and if you have the right setup for it, it just makes sense.
But buying massive vats of butter isn’t the only way to save time and money in the restaurant industry. New technologies are creating novel ways to get more out of less, and they’re doing it by taking advantage of something else restaurants can get in bulk: their own data. Knowledge is power, and businesses are starting to coax more and more dollar signs from the stacks of data that are only now becoming available.
Get Data From Your Front of House Sales
The first place they’re looking is their customers. Knowing who is spending how much, when, and on what is a simple, but incredibly effective way to maximize the bottom line. Loyalty programs are an easy way to get customer spending data, but they only work when people sign up.
The next big thing is software from companies like Swipely that analyze patterns based on credit card information. Using their program, restaurants can discover what is driving repeat business, which marketing efforts are worth more investment, which menu items encourage additional spending, and which staff members bring in the most revenue.
These are the kinds of insights into front of house operations that would make any manager swoon.
Get Data From Your Back of House Buying
Front of house gets a lot of attention, not least because that’s where the money comes in for restaurants. But back of house operations are just as important, especially since that’s where the money goes out.
When it comes to restaurants’ spending, the latest technology is as simple as online ordering. Improvonia, for example, puts all a restaurant’s suppliers in one place online, so that chefs can place all their orders to all their vendors in just one click.
This simple, effective tool has an added bonus: with all the purchasing information in one place, Improvonia has built-in analytics that managers can use to scour their buying patterns for places to reduce waste, add value, and maybe even buy in bulk.
Suppliers using Improvonia also get the advantage of real-time analytics. As soon as orders are placed, they are automatically organized online so that the supplier can access them anytime, anywhere via the website or smartphone app. At the same time, Improvonia’s software creates real-time graphs and data comparisons that let the business see trends and changes in client ordering. The company no longer has to enter everything into spreadsheets, or fiddle with formulas to see what’s going on with their sales. The data is at their fingertips as soon as the orders come in.
A Big Improvement From The Past
Data on orders, sales, customer habits, staff performance, and more, has always been available, it’s just that tapping into it used to require an untenable amount of extra time and effort. It was like gold buried too deep for past mining methods.
Now, we have the right equipment to drill deep into the numbers and extract the most valuable information in the business. With these new technologies, it’s no longer about whether you can get the data, it’s about what you can do with it.
