Elevate Your Food Cost Control Strategy with a Vendor Management System

When selecting a restaurant operations system, its vendor management features and functions should enhance your foodservice partnerships.

Have you ever thought about how a restaurant is kind of like a three-legged stool? In this metaphor, each leg supports the operational success of the restaurant. One leg of the stool represents your customers. The second leg represents your operations. The third leg represents your partners. If any of the three legs are weak, then your whole business could topple.

Have a look at the partner leg of the stool.

One of the most important partners in a restaurant operation has are their foodservice vendors, distributors or their major broadliner like US. Foods, GFS, Sysco, Coca-cola, and thousands of others.

Sysco, a leading industry foodservice distributor, notes that as of 2018 there are more than 16,500 companies engaged in the distribution of food and non-food products to the foodservice industry in the United States. These 16,500 companies serve about 17.7% of the $264 billion in annual foodservice market in the US and Canada.

Did you know that your food and labor operations can greatly benefit from vendor management cost control tools with a quality BOH restaurant management platform?

Why Vendor Management is Important to your BOH Operations

Here are 8 reasons why partnering with a restaurant BOH platform with vendor management functionality can help restaurants save money on food costs.

1. Coordinate Electronically with Vendors – Save resources and increase precision with start-to-finish electronic supplier integration that will help with payment reconciliation, invoicing, ordering and order guide updates.
2. Grow Satisfaction and Safety for your Customers – Your customers will greatly appreciate the consistency of your food quality created by selecting dependable vendors and centrally defining all product specs across your operations.
3. Vendor Scorecards – Use scorecards to compare invoices and delivery experiences with the terms for each vendor order and contract. A quality BOH software system will electronically construct scorecards that ascertain fill ratios, service quality, quality of the product, and compliance with the contract.
4. Greater Supplier Control – Use order guide controls, quick credit recovery, and automated exception alerts to remove supplier overcharges and substitutions not approved.
5. Audit Contracts – Secure 24/7 understanding in order to better fill ratios, and clarify price compliance, service levels, and substitutions amongst restaurants, products, regions and vendors.
6. Administration for Vendors – Grow procure-to-pay cycle and decrease administrative overhead when you coordinate all vendors in a central portal where they can manage their own order guides, credits, and payments.
7. Normalize Units of Measure – Track individual vendor products as well as pack sizes on your company's master product list. This will increase inventory and order accuracy and will normalize products across vendors.
8. Bid Analysis Simplicity– Simplify your vendor bid analysis by using an automated “apples-to-apples” bid analyzer in order to centrally locate and select approved products, specifications, vendors, pack sizes and prices.

To learn more, reach out to CrunchTime and request an online demonstration.