How Hotels are Benefiting from a Single Source of Truth for F&B Management

The digitalisation of food and beverage management in hotels has increased menu margins, product quality and employee happiness.

Specifically, the introduction of a single source of truth has helped hotel chains to streamline the clunky processes and communications that deal with food cost, inventory management and purchasing.

The restaurant inventory statistics below highlight that progress in these areas was more than welcome.

F&B Management in Hotels: The Challenge

Many industry professionals say their number one challenge is to reduce high food costs, without giving in on quality or customer experience.

The drivers for high food costs are poor inventory management and unreliable purchasing data.

These two pain points are draining hotel margins. For multi-unit hotel operations, the losses are exponential.

A single source of truth for food and beverage management in hotels puts an end to that, and that is not all it does.

According to one study, operators can add between 2% and 10% to their bottom line thanks to optimised inventory control and accurate purchasing. These chains quickly identify sales trends and minimise over- and understocking.

Better inventory control and purchasing adds up to 10% to the bottom line.

A Single Source of Truth: How it Works

The single source of truth is a cloud-based system that is capable of capturing all F&B action and the metrics. Users have access to the data from their laptop or mobile device.

It works like this: the system collects the operational data from different sources and does the numbers crunching. The easy to navigate dashboard then displays all the realtime performance metrics for everyone involved.

The system is transparent and flexible. It reduces the number of manual actions and the chances of mistakes happening. And above all, having an integrated system for F&B management in hotels speeds up operations.

Picture this…

The hotel executive chef, the F&B manager, the finance manager and the general manager, all looking at the same dashboard and sharing the same up-to-date numbers to make strategic and operational decisions.

An integrated system like this used to be a fantasy because food and beverage is notoriously hard to monitor in hotels.

These days, however, technology is making the tracking of inventory, purchasing, product development and menu engineering reasonably straight-forward.

Let’s Take a Look at Inventory

Inventory management is vital for keeping food cost under control. In hotels, unfortunately, it can be a nightmare – so many bars, dining rooms, buffets and a range of people responsible for the ordering and receiving of goods.

Overstocking and ordering errors are always lurking behind the corner.

And they are costly.

There is less chance of things going wrong when everybody has access to the same operational data.

When the operations manager, the chefs and the procurement-team all work in the same system, the F&B manager only has to push one button to generate a precise bill-of-materials.

There is no going through spreadsheets or emailing coworkers anymore, because the data they need are already there. The software calculates the amounts that need to be ordered by cross-referencing recipes, inventory status and portions required.

There is no going through spreadsheets anymore.

The accounting team can go into the order backlog of the system and double-check supplier invoices. It saves everyone time and reduces the risk of mistakes greatly.

When F&B management in hotels goes digital

Digitalisation gets rid of the all too common guesswork, resulting in:

• Data-driven decision making cloud
• Accurate procurement planning
• Low food cost
• Efficient staff onboarding
• Less admin, more quality

Just as important, sharing information between teams and departments is now instant and 100% accurate.

Assess Your Competitiveness

Food and beverage management processes in hotels are typically things that develop organically over time. With technology making rapid progress, this is an excellent time to assess the robustness of your system.

Below you will find nine questions to do so. We have included the ideal answers.

They give you an idea of where you are at right now and how the competition is using tech to manage food and beverages in their hotel chains.

Talk to Our Hotel Tech Team

Jump on a 15-minute call with our hotel tech team and take us through the issues with food and beverage management that your team is looking to resolve.