Apart from locations, clients' preferences, and quality, inventory management is another factor that determines the survival and profitability of restaurants. Imagine having intelligent solutions that could help manage inventory and the supply chain more effectively and comprehensively; the potential for increased profits and growth would be significant.
What is AI Ordering?
The AI Ordering solution from Sertis utilizes AI to analyze and manage inventory and supply chain, maximizing efficiency and minimizing mistakes.
AI Ordering helps collect relevant data, including inventory tracking, sales, customer behaviors, trends, and environmental data, such as the weather, to conduct demand forecasting with the highest accuracy. Based on the forecast, it calculates appropriate stock levels and makes optimized replenishment decisions and orders to reduce waste costs and maintain sales opportunities.
What can AI Ordering do?
1. Manage and make accurate replenishment decisions to reduce costs.
One of the factors that enables efficient and profitable day-to-day restaurant operations is having a well-stocked inventory available at all times. However, maintaining enough inventory stocks and simultaneously avoiding waste can be risky. Even a slight mistake can turn a profit into a loss. Therefore, accurate inventory calculations and optimized replenishment decisions are crucial factors for restaurants to consider.
AI Ordering improves inventory management accuracy by using AI technology to track and analyze inventory data alongside customer preferences, sales, behaviors, and item trends. As an assistant to humans, AI Ordering helps determine replenishment decisions and order quantities daily. By analyzing big data, AI Ordering can achieve accurate predictions and calculations, reducing the chances of errors.
2. Maximize sales
AI can help maximize sales in several ways, including gaining customer knowledge to create personalized marketing, streamlining operations to enhance customer satisfaction, and ensuring a well-stocked inventory at all times to satisfy customer needs. The latter is particularly crucial and has the potential to reduce lost opportunities and increase sales.
AI Ordering comes into play by ensuring that inventory is tracked and ready to meet customer needs. As a result, whenever the customer needs the product, we can respond promptly, enabling the restaurant to avoid lost opportunities resulting from a stockout and improve customer satisfaction at the same time.
3. Reduce operational costs
AI technology provides access to more data than ever, allowing business sectors that apply AI, including restaurants, to gain deeper insights into their operations and overall business situations. With the ever-increasing ability to access, store, and analyze data, businesses can identify weaknesses and find practical solutions.
AI Ordering facilitates restaurants to identify opportunities to reduce costs by tracking inventory and making more accurate replenishment decisions that meet situational demands, resulting in fewer wasted ingredients and costly mistakes. In addition, AI Ordering also helps reduce the time and resources required for manual tasks.
4. Increase the efficiency of the overall supply chain system.
The supply chain system is the lifeline of restaurants, acting as a pipeline that keeps the restaurant running smoothly on a daily basis. However, the supply chain system is constantly changing and is sensitive to external factors such as market trends, weather conditions, and changes in sales volume, which complicates its management. Continuous supply chain management 24/7 can help increase the efficiency of restaurant operations. Achieving this may be challenging for human labor, but fortunately, we now have AI to assist us.
AI Ordering utilizes AI that can work efficiently 24/7, enabling non-stop tracking and analysis for general and trending or seasonal demands. AI Ordering forecasts customer demands based on customer behavior, tracks inventory, and determines the optimal stock level and time for replenishment, ensuring well-stocked inventory is available to satisfy customers at any time. AI Ordering also compares and finds suppliers that provide quality products at reasonable prices. Additionally, AI can adjust supply chain management to the situation in real time. AI Ordering also helps manage merchandising and assortment to prepare for various needs and targets.
Case Study: McDonald's utilizes AI to take supply chain management to the next level.
McDonald's, the world's largest restaurant chain, is another example of the next level of how to leverage AI to manage inventory and the overall supply chain. McDonald's tracks inventory data to align customer purchasing decisions with real-time stock levels, which leads to increased sales while reducing food waste and managing the supply chain with maximum efficiency.
If the chicken in the stock is running low, but there is plenty of beef left, the AI system will automatically adjust the dynamic menu by temporarily removing chicken products and giving beef products greater prominence on the menu. This tactic helps reduce lost sales opportunities and prioritizes the selling of beef to minimize waste.
The McDonald's case study demonstrates that although AI Ordering seems to tackle only one aspect of restaurant management, it can positively impact sales. Inventory management is one of the essential components for achieving operational efficiency and generating profits, which are crucial for a restaurant to survive and grow.
Restaurant owners shouldn't overlook AI Ordering, as it transforms tasks that were once manual and fallible, causing higher costs and lost opportunities. The AI Ordering solution helps increase sales and competitiveness, enabling restaurants to survive in an ever-increasingly competitive era.
Learn more about AI Ordering solution from Sertis: https://www.sertiscorp.com/retail