Lowering Costs and Optimizing Restaurant Operations With Connected Planning
By: Hillary Sich
An efficient restaurant is better than the alternative for everyone involved, from ownership to managers and each and every customer. The same is true for restaurants that have the solutions in place to effectively forecast, analyze and plan around future needs.
More thorough and accurate insight leads to additional opportunities for cost savings. At the same time, your locations will have the actionable information needed to offer menus in line with customer preferences at the individual restaurant level, encouraging sales with relevant and attractive options.
First, let’s look at some of the limitations present in common tools for budgeting and planning. Then, we’ll dive into the many benefits that a specialized connected planning solution can offer to your locations, collectively and on an individual basis.
How current planning tools can hold your restaurants back
From sales, labor and supply and demand forecasting to food cost and menu mix, there are so many critical activities that restaurants must regularly engage in to manage expenses and attract customers. Does your company have the right solutions in place to optimize these tasks and reap the benefits of fully connected forecasting and planning?
If your business relies on spreadsheet software, the answer is likely “No.”
That’s not to say there’s no value in spreadsheets as tools for gathering and sorting data or making calculations. But the ability to dive deep into available data and achieve a high degree of accuracy in forecasting and planning is often limited. Getting down to a detailed level is crucial for making beneficial decisions that add up over time, but the structure and format of spreadsheets often don’t effectively support that approach to planning.
There’s no reason to stop using spreadsheets entirely, of course. They remain valuable tools for tracking information. Spreadsheets even allow for a basic and limited form of forecasting. However, they can’t compare to more advanced solutions that support not only data collection and calculations, but also enable thorough and accurate forecasting, modeling, analysis, price optimization and similarly vital tasks.
Let’s take a closer look at Anaplan, a solution expressly designed to empower companies and their staff to create and share models and plans in a more collaborative, real-time and detailed process.
How can Anaplan support my restaurants?
With multiple locations in play — and each one having its own group of customers with their own preferences on product and price — planning, forecasting and analysis become especially complex. That makes having the right solution an especially high priority.
Anaplan offers the systems and support needed to forecast and analyze a variety of decisions related to the two highest costs of operating restaurants: labor and food.
Leveraging the smallest details
With Anaplan in place, it’s entirely possible — and practical — to access historical data down to the level of a single menu item at an individual location. Similarly, your staff can generate sales predictions from this granular perspective. That means consistent access to valuable context, which can guide everything from big-picture decisions about your standard menu to small changes for just one location.
At Allitix, we’ve helped major companies address needs large and small with Anaplan through expert consultancy and instruction. For example, we assisted a national casual dining chain with both corporate and store-level profit and loss planning.
Empowering seasonal decision-making
Taking advantage of fresher ingredients and aligning with customer preferences that shift based on the season simply makes sense. Whether your restaurants make major menu updates as the seasons change or simply add and remove a few items, offering popular options and keeping costs manageable are always top priorities.
Anaplan makes it easy to dive into existing data without the process becoming too complex or overwhelming. Your staff can easily find and analyze relevant info about seasonal items, as well as generate forecasting and modeling based on it. That includes considerations of both popularity and price, and leads to more holistic and productive decisions.
Adjusting to changing trends and restrictions
The COVID-19 pandemic showed us how quickly an emergency can impact restaurant operations. Businesses needed to adjust quickly to tap into available revenue streams, like delivery, take-out and drive-through operations, and cut losses while dining rooms sat empty.
Anaplan emphasizes speed along with accuracy in all of the tasks it enables, providing relevant and useful information and analysis quickly. When every hour of operations has an impact on revenue and costs, fast adjustments are a clear advantage. Anaplan supports efforts to identify the most effective choices, even when the range of options might be limited by public health guidelines or other rules.
Absent a pandemic or other extraordinary event, there are still changes in food costs and customer preferences to keep in mind. The actions of competitors, growing popularity of new food trends, viral internet attention around a new menu item and much more can all lead to an impact on per-location and overall transaction volume and revenue.
Anaplan plays a pivotal role in taking raw data about restaurant operations and turning it into actionable information and informed forecasting. Your staff can leverage these assets to make data-backed decisions, optimizing labor and food costs.
Earlier planning to support lower costs
Anaplan helps your business analyze menu items and generate forecasts related to them, taking popularity and cost into account. When your company has a clear picture of its future needs, you can more effectively negotiate with vendors and make more detailed plans for your supply chain. Instead of relying on last-minute ordering, your organization can reach a more cost-effective agreement with suppliers.
Allitix: Enabling success with Anaplan
Implementing a connected planning solution across any business can be a highly demanding task. That’s especially true for restaurant companies with multiple locations.
As an Anaplan Gold Partner, Allitix has a long track record of providing crucial assistance in terms of training, technology enablement, strategy and operations consulting and overall support for the customer planning experience. To learn more, get in touch with our team today.