What does the ideal restaurant management system look like?
Imagine an ideal restaurant management business system. In your perfect world what would this look like?
- Does it include many systems each running separately?
- Are integrations hard to maintain?
- Does each department have a distinct (and defensible) version of the ‘truth’?
- Is it difficult to consolidate information across stores and across multiple brands quickly to support executive decision making?
- Do you spend a bunch of time managing systems instead of growing your business?
Restaurants have so many systems there are now companies with the sole purpose of tying legacy systems together! That doesn’t feel like a step in the right direction.
Unlocking the tremendous value locked in the back office
The back office is the central nervous system for your executive decision making.
Cloud systems like Salesforce have taken hold in the restaurant space as a ‘centralized platform’ to store and manage historical customer transactions, segment guests and inform marketing systems whether loyalty platforms, mobile apps, acquisition efforts with facebook advertising or cutting-edge customer lifecycle marketing systems.
A mature SaaS CRM, like Salesforce, provides the ability to extract valuable guest data from the POS to make it actionable. But that’s where the value stops.
While this is of tremendous value to an organization, and a giant step forward from the legacy restaurant email marketing platforms, it still leaves a tremendous amount of back office integration and does not provide value beyond the guest transaction management.
But how does the guest data relate to the inventory data, to the accounting data, to purchasing data….
After all, aren’t those guest transactions taking place at a certain restaurant in your chain?
Is the menu item not pulling from inventory at that location? Is that menu item comprised of ingredients that reduce inventory levels at that location?
And aren’t those locations rolling up into a single restaurant system? And does each location’s COGS not inform that of the entire system?
What are the benefits of a fully integrated restaurant inventory management software system?
I propose that modern restaurant inventory software should be fully integrated with Accounting, Financials, Purchasing, Invoicing, CRM and POS.
Look at these 5 game changing benefits from running a fully integrated cloud based restaurant inventory management software.
- Real-Time Visibility At Every Level Of The Business. When a guest orders a meal, ingredients are tracked against inventory in real-time allowing executives to always have real-time accounting across all stores in a chain and across all chains in a conglomerate.
- Real-time Promotions Profitability. Are you a CFO skeptical about loyalty program impact? With fully integrated [inventory + accounting + POS] restaurants can track promotions and loyalty profitability in real-time.
- Streamlining Inventory Management. Still performing physical inventory counts with paper? Food costs can reach 40% and many restaurants are still managing inventory manually. Use a tablet to enter in the data faster and with fewer mistakes.
- Automating Purchase Orders. How much time is spent manually creating purchase orders? With automated reorder levels purchasing nearly manages itself!
- Simplifying Executive Decision Making. How much time is spent by an expensive data gymnast to prepare executive level reports created from data found in 5-10 different systems? How about a single report? NetSuite can consolidate financials immediately across locations within one or many legal entities.
NetSuite’s cloud business management platform is perfectly designed to transform the mult-system chaos of a restaurant chain into a single database, a single source of truth to manage the business.
Take a look at some of these restaurants that use NetSuite Restaurant ERP to grow their restaurant chains.
 | Service: QSR Units: 50 Location: Australia/APAC |
 | Service: Table Service Units: 5 Location: Austin, TX |
 | Service: QSR Units: 1,200 Location: Taiwan |
 | Service: QSR Units: 281 Location: Canada |
 | Service: Coffee and Ecommerce Units: 18 Location: Birmingham, AL |
