Managing a restaurant kitchen isn’t easy, and it can be particularly difficult in the fast-paced quick service restaurant (QSR) space. Planning menus, ensuring a good customer experience, complying with regulations, keeping kitchens clean and safe, and managing people are just some of the day-to-day responsibilities that operators must manage effectively. They must also adapt to changing consumer preferences, deliver food to customers quickly, minimize incorrect errors and ensure a good experience that keeps those diners coming back for more.
The challenges don’t end there. QSR operators must also run profitable operations, where their raw material, labor and overhead costs remain lower than their sales revenues, or the money they make from selling menu items. This is a delicate balance in an industry where 3-6% profit margins are the norm, and where outside factors like rising food costs, inflation and supply chain disruptions continue to take a bite out of QSRs’ profitability.
With many QSRs heavily reliant on basic accounting systems like QuickBooks, spreadsheets and a lot of manhours spent shuttling data back and forth between these systems—and, across dozens of different physical locations—kitchen management is a time- and resource-intensive chore. By automating their commissary kitchen management, restaurants can streamline this aspect of their operations, connect data sources, manage rising costs and improve profitability across their stores.
A Modern, Lightweight Solution
NetSuite delivers a modern and lightweight restaurant software solution for franchisors, restaurants and hospitality groups to drive revenue and reduce costs. With a solid foundation of back-end financials and inventory in a unified cloud platform, restaurants can elevate their business by adding the functionality required to meet their changing business needs including point-of-sale integration, commissary and franchise management, and more.
“Adapting to guests’ everchanging preferences continues to be a driving force of innovation within the restaurant industry,” NetSuite states. “As guests become more informed, more connected and more particular about their needs, restaurants must be constantly thinking about how they can differentiate themselves in the market.”
With NetSuite’s Commissary Kitchen feature, QSRs get a point of sale (POS) system that runs the front of the house while the ERP handles the financials, accounting and other back-of-the-house operations. Working with ERP Success Partners to implement NetSuite, QSRs that make this move can expect benefits like:
1. Better operational visibility
Make cross-platform, data-driven decisions by leveraging a centralized view of the restaurant business with role-based dashboards, reports and key performance indicators. Whether it’s the Back of House (BOH) Manager in the walk-in refrigerator, or the CFO in the boardroom, each role has access to the data they need to make more informed restaurant management decisions.
2. Elimination of manual processes
Build efficiency by connecting or replacing multiple point solutions with a single suite of applications. By enabling one system of record for financials, inventory, POS, CRM and Human Capital Management (HCM), restaurants can reduce redundant data entry touch points.
3. Leverage powerful analytics
Enhanced analytics in NetSuite help QSRs improve the customer experience, explore new ordering/delivery models and enter new geographies with a foundational platform to forecast and support their growth goals. Restaurants can readily track their financials, menu management, procurement and the overall guest experience.
4. Faster time to close
QSRs can use NetSuite’s restaurant financial segmentation, custom fiscal calendars and multi-concept/location consolidation to increase staff productivity, close the books faster and benefit from robust reporting tools that deliver insight into their operations’ financial performance.
5. Improved procurement management
NetSuite helps QSRs manage their vendors and purchasing processes with the visibility and control needed to drive down cost of goods sold (COGS). They can also track ingredient inventory from purchase to plate with various recipe types, multiple units of measure, transfers, and dashboard KPIs.
6. Better inventory controls
Using NetSuite, QSRs can easily perform shelf-to-sheet cycle counts by storage area and shelf, and maintain count templates with drag-and-drop functionality.
With NetSuite’s guest service dashboard, QSRs can manage, resolve and track guest inquiries and complaints with case management to improve guest satisfaction. Finally, the cloud ERP integrates directly with leading POS providers to increase data integrity and eliminate manual processes. Restaurants get overall visibility into inventory, sales and revenue and can use these insights to produce more accurate forecasting, reduce waste, increase productivity and tackle their most complex kitchen commissary management challenges.
