How is business intelligence helping the food service industry’s growth?
Buying and selling food items is one of the most complex issues existing in today’s economy. You need to look out for many factors to make your business run efficiently. If you really want to know the nitty-gritty of your business operations, a good management information system is a must-have. That is where business intelligence solutions come in.
It is the power that can help the food businesses understand the business processes in a better way and run them more effectively.
A paradigm shift from ingredients to intelligence
Gone are the days when the food service industry relied heavily on intuition and experience for decision making. Business intelligence has transformed the whole industry. For food manufacturers and businesses, it is not just limited to producing quality ingredients but a way beyond that. It makes you understand the market trends, predict demand and adapt to the evolving needs of the customers.
For instance – Imagine a scenario where a dairy supplier gets insights on the surge in demand for a particular type of cheese used in pizza chains. The numbers will help you know how to ramp up the production of that particular cheese type to meet the demand for the upcoming orders and ultimately strengthen customer relationships.
This example clearly tells how business intelligence is reshaping the growth of the foodservice industry.
Want to know more? Let’s get started with understanding its impact on the foodservice industry growth in more detail.
Inventory management – Do you know the key to reduce food waste? The answer is accurate restaurant inventory management. Sales data analysis under business intelligence lets you know which ingredients are short in supply, which ones you need to reorder and which ones don’t need to be purchased immediately. It helps in supply chain optimization. Business intelligence may also help you with finding the variation between the expected and actual utilization of resources to develop your strategies for making the best use of the resources.
You can integrate your POS system with the food service management system to automate the tracking of inventory based on sales. In this way, you will be able to know which items are lost as spoilage and hence have accurate inventory data. All in all, the right data helps you form the right policies for food loss and inventory management.
Identifying popular items – Some food items sell like hotcakes while some may sit on the shelves for a long period of time. How can business intelligence make this better? It simplifies the process of highlighting the popular ingredients that are making roar across multiple locations.
Food manufacturers and businesses can then make informed decisions on retaining, expanding, producing or discontinuing a menu item. Having the idea of popular and top-menu food items lets you produce those items to make profits. Such insights immensely help in the makeup of sales to enhance the customer’s satisfaction besides making more profits.
Focus on information – What is the primary goal of business intelligence? The answer is translating existing data into information that is easy to interpret. This information makes it easy to arrive at the operational and strategic decisions to make your business operations seamless. You can have information on the sourcing of ingredients, stock management, control of production, and the distribution of goods and services.
The information on ingredients helps you form the process of how to produce them more efficiently and optimize logistics. And there is no denying the fact that these pieces of information have a significant role to play in determining the success of the food businesses.
Grab opportunities – Whether it’s a trend or a chance to enhance your profit margin, business intelligence holds the power to provide you with the tools to make the most of those opportunities. You might have seen many instances where you unintentionally tend to overlook the small opportunities of making profits as a foodservice business. Gaining knowledge on the business numbers allows you to find out the small changes and shifts that provide you with opportunities and risks to your business. No wonder, data is a powerful tool to let your business fly high.
Business intelligence is the way to keep track on and to improve your entire business. Starting from the ingredients you produce to the waste you generate while producing them, it can serve you with actionable bits of information. So, why not grab the opportunities business intelligence comes with and make your foodservice business flourish?
To recapitulate
Believe it or not, business intelligence is not just limited to being a tool, it’s a force that can change the game for the food industry. From optimizing inventory levels to predicting trends, you can craft great culinary experiences with it by your side. At last, it couldn’t be more right when we say that business intelligence has become an unsung hero propelling the growth and innovation of the food industry.
