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Tired of managing multiple outlets of your restaurant at a time?
Well, that’s quite normal, because managing a chain of outlets is a tedious and time-consuming process. From sales to inventory you need to keep an eye on everything around you.
But with the use of robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), you can easily manage all the prominent challenges in organising a multi-restaurant chain.
Even a small change in inventory is exactly reflected in records through ERP systems. For instance, if you purchase a single ingredient for your culinary kitchen, then the stock count in your ERP systems will immediately show a rise in the stock. Similarly, if a customer places an order for a particular dish, then the stock count shows a decrease in the count of those ingredients which are used in that dish.
All these features of ERP systems show that the need for using it in your restaurant. With its frequent inventory check-ups, you can identify the exact time to re-stock and also avoid food wastage by effectively reducing excessive purchases. The impeccable features of ERP reduce labour hours as well as the reduction of billable staff for inventory administration.
However, having a piece of great knowledge about the ERP systems is also beneficial in restaurant management as well as finding the right system for your business.
What is an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) System?
An Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system has the capacity to offer an integrated performance of business applications. ERP systems have features like incorporating broad and vast end-to-end processes like finance, manufacturing, supply chain, finance, etc.
Despite the different industrial locations, it automatically organise a wide array of administrative and operational business processes including a line of business, asset organising, customer management and many more. However, implementing ERP systems are complex and a little expensive process which sometimes became difficult for organisation to define any business benefits.
Restaurant ERP systems are also renowned for merging anarchic restaurant tasks like accounting, customer relationship management, supply chain, ordering, purchasing, and more under one phase.
The cloud-based restaurant ERP software offers the complete end-to-end restaurant management of your business and helps you to manage various operations from one point.
More than any other customer-centric business, it is more beneficial to the restaurant business since it helps your staff to work in a fast-paced environment and take quick decisions which in turn providing better customer service and can earn higher business profits.
What are the Key Features Offered By an ERP System?
We already mentioned that how tedious is managing a restaurant. But with the right ERP system and its beneficial features now you organise your restaurant business flawlessly. So let’s check those interesting and useful features of ERP systems.
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- Detailed Reporting
ERP software can provide data from core financial processes to production cycles, including insights into every single step of manufacturing. Investing and implementing the right ERP system will help in ensuring real-time detailed and multi-level reports of all the end-to-end activities of your
restaurant.
It generates reports on a daily basis including the entire information regarding inventory management, specially offered discounts, the performance of each staff, detailed data about billings, even reports regarding the growth curve of your restaurant business.
It also focused to provide insights outside your business intelligence and this one of the latest features of ERP software. A report regarding the purchase order is displayed as an agreement to buy your product. The label automatically prints the receipt when such an agreement report is reported.
Balance sheets, revenue generated reports, and loss or positive cash flow reports are other major categories of ERP reports which have the utmost importance. Here the data can be accessed from anywhere even though it is formatted by local accounting principles.
Ad hoc and agile report creation are mandatory in the restaurant management system for every organisation to understand its new threats as well as opportunities. Now all the advanced ERP systems have a tool called query or report generator tool. This query can be decoded and can use as data for understanding the customer needs.
The dashboard with user access controls of ERP software has both qualitative and quantitative regarding individual users, their separate orders, and much more.
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- ERP Inventory Management
ERP inventory management shows the interlinked approach to business strategies, operations in areas like finance, logistics, inventory, and operations. ERP inventory management is an enormous time-saving process. A centralised system manages all the day-to-day activity along with narrow down all the double-handling processes.
Despite the size of the organisation every restaurateur wants to save money and at the same time wants more efficiency. This is completely possible with the ERP inventory management
system. Rather than paying money to different platforms to collect various data regarding your business, with an effective and tight ERP system you can assemble the entire inventory data from one platform.
A plethora of business firms are using shipping service providers for outsourcing their logistics needs. But the ERP inventory management system permits you to connect with external partners and allows productive and consistent communication among each other. From stock to shipping everything is connected across the supply chain.
ERP inventory management system offers regular updates regarding the stocks, orders, and customer under an umbrella and helps in quality information assembling. Since it provides a wide range of reports and most of the time we don’t need all, so you can customise the reports according to the business needs.
Another main advantage of ERP inventory management is that it is crafted to diminish manual labour, throughout the streamlined and automatic end-to-end processes. Depends on your needs or radar you can either localise it or expand it.
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- Customer Relationship Management
Being a restaurateur, you should be familiar with the term customer relationship management or CRM and how it is connected to enterprise resources planning, and how both help in boosting productivity and revenue. CRM or customer relationship management is used to manage, automate and interconnect business sales, marketing, and customer service.
It is one of the best techniques to communicate with your current and potential customers. With its data analysis techniques, organisations can track customers’ history by mainly focusing on their retention and encourage them in repetitive business and hence drives more sales and productivity. In conventional methods, people used to store customer details by means of spreadsheets and paper works, but with time there is a great chance of losing such valuable assets.
By integrating customer relationship management in ERP, you can access one account in one location and no need to spend time as well money in two accounts. With a centralised location account, you only need to add data in one location. Duplicating information was one of the main issues faced by software users. By using the interlinked CRM and ERP it can be solved. While ERP focused on billing and shipping-related processes, CRM look at customer relationship management.
In most of the B2B systems, the sales representative needs to use the data in the enterprise resources planning and frequently needs to check the order updates and need to data decisions accordingly. But with an integrated system with ERP and CRM, they will real-time and accurate day at anywhere. Also, the ability to work cross-departmentally, without any department pits is made possible with the use of ERP and CRM.
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- Marketing Management
Now you may wonder why are we comparing ERP and marketing?
It sounds confusing, right?
Do you ever wonder how an ERP system and marketing management are co-related?
To know these things better, you should first think about how you will evaluate marketing tactics used in your business?
Are there any tools, through which you can analyse the same better?
The point is that it depends on how effective the marketing strategy works well with your business needs not how good the strategy is. And in such cases, an ERP is the best restaurant management software that helps improve the results and identify the small errors in the whole marketing planning.
An ERP helps in assisting you to get an entire overview not only just about the efficiency in your marketing strategies but also how effectively it can drive potential customers to your business through well-defined data. Knowing your customer is always an up hand in sales and can outrace your competitors.
It is also an asset in keeping the marketing strategies for the long term and prioritising and personalising it on making good relationships with your customers.
Restaurant Digital marketing is moving at a rapid speed to conquer the upcoming trends, customers’ growing needs, and prerequisites, and new tech-savvy techniques. So it is clearly evident that interlinking the data available through ERP to the various advanced strategies of digital marketing is how essential. So by connecting the ERP software with the marketing tactics you can make sure the access to real- time information.
Using those wide arrays of data, your marketing experts can take necessary data-driven solutions and decisions for the betterment of your business. Also to optimise customer acquisition, you need to find your target audience.
From ERP software, you can easily analyse the performances of each of your dishes or cuisine, and it will give a crystal clear idea about the buying pattern of your customers and to which category customers you should more focus. So before going for a big promotion for your brand or any particular offer, having a comprehensive idea about the figures in ERP is an added point.
If the marketing assemblage and the ERP software perfectly blend together, they will offer your brand a competitive edge. You can easily do relevant research through the comprehensive data and skim to find out the treasure for your business.
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- Payment Management
Payment management offers data about cash flow in your business, by processing and analysing all transactions and invoices, receipts generated each time. Payment also helps in tracking financial transactions that happened for a given period of time, in which the source of fund, utilisation of money to make sure liquidity in order to meet payment commitments of your business.
Maintaining payment will helps in determining how payments are carried out, in which the below parameter is considered.
• Whether it is an automatic or manual payment.
• Maximum money per organisation partner in a single payment method.
• Bank account through which the payment is done.
• Output options like cheques or direct debit
Composing features in which receipts are generated individually or through a combination of people. Payment authorisation helps people to know the maximum amount a customer can pay to your business or if the customer is authorised to give advance payment. General ledger linking shows the options for several charts of accounts linked to the different stages of transactions.
Payments for inventory management are also displayed in this advanced software for the restaurant.
One of the main advantages of such a payment management system is that it offers a comprehensive insight that highlights the liquidity position of the business at a particular point in the future. While analysing revenue generation process, the system use data from ERP system regarding both purchase orders, purchase invoices, sales order, sales invoices, your financial budget, and standing orders.
Is installing Enterprise resources planning (ERP) expensive?
Many business ventures now started using ERP systems than accounting systems because of innovative features and cost-effectiveness when compared to others.
Like everyone, you also may be confused about the expenses you need to meet if you want to invest in ERP software for your restaurant business. ERP software is a mandatory tool that is used to perform accounting, product planning and growth tracking, inventory management, and more. Otherwise, you need to invest in separate platforms like inventory tracker, accounting software, and many more to assemble data about your business.
So when you ask about an accurate amount for an ERP system, the only answer that we can give is “it depends” because it truly is. But one thing that we can surely explain to you is the factors that decide the cost of every ERP system.
- Implementation
- Training
- Customisation
- Redesign process
- Maintenance
- Upgrades
- Service support
Implementation
ERP systems are launched and implemented by industrial experts, so it is necessary to add the cost for the implementation to the total expense of ERP software. ERP systems are sophisticated and complex tools, which makes it necessary for seeking help from professionals while installing the same at your restaurant business. So also need to take a demo test for ensuring the proper and safe working of ERP systems.
Training
As I mentioned early ERP systems are quite sophisticated and complex tools, hence proper training on how to use the tool is an added benefit for your business. You need to understand the fact that not all employees in your restaurant are tech-savvy nor they will instantaneously capture the new techniques. So a finite time is necessary to understand the basic working aspects of such innovative tools. With the productive training by the expert, employees will understand things better. So paying a training fee is worthwhile.
Customisation
Another fact is that every business is different even if it is from the same domain, it will have different marketing objectives, different patterns of service, and also have different expectations in return. So it is essential to customise your system according to your business goals. If you didn’t then there is a high chance that your customers will choose your competitors who having these add-on features over you.
Redesign Process
So if you are planning to replace an accounting system with an ERP system, then you need to make changes, and giving your system a redesign is mandatory. Because accounting software only provides you the data about your accounts and payments and of course you need to depend on other platforms for collecting various data to get the overall picture about your business. So when you are switching from one to another you need to deny other platforms and change your system according to streamline each and everything in one place.
Maintenance
Purchasing and implementing an ERP system doesn’t help you to touch the sky. For that proper use of data from the system as well as proper maintaining of the system are necessary. An ERP cost alone can include the cost of hardware, network, and labour costs. But for the proper working of the system for the long run then proper maintenance is also important and the maintenance cost typically ranges between 15-20%.
Upgrades
Like any other software, the ERP system also needs regular upgrades. Depends on the level of upgrades you looking for in your system, you can pay for it. You should also consider how such upgrades help your business in a good way.
Service Support
There is a high chance that you or your employees surely face some issues or doubt while using the system. In such cases, 24/7 service support is an added facility. You can ask your service provider whether the support charge includes the licensing fee also or not.
Investing in an ERP system for restaurant inventory management offers cost savings, improved productivity, and enhanced customer satisfaction, positioning your establishment for long-term success in the evolving hospitality industry.
