MarketMan is unveiling a powerful new feature of its cloud-based inventory management and purchasing platform at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago on May 20-22. Stop by booth #6064 to see a product demonstration of Suggestive Ordering.What Is Suggestive Ordering?

Ordering is one of the most critical parts of managing a restaurant. Once an item has been ordered it has only two likely outcomes – it either gets sold or gets wasted. For the sake of profitability, Managers obviously want to sell what’s ordered and avoid waste and unprofitable outcomes.

MarketMan’s Suggestive Ordering makes Periodic Automatic Replacement (PAR) level ordering easy, fast, and automatic. This feature helps efficiently forecast demand for menu items, facilitates more accurate orders, and:

• Reduces food waste caused by over-ordering due to misjudging traffic and menu item demand
• Increases customer satisfaction by ensuring inventory for favorite menu items will meet forecasted demand — eliminating having to 86 best-selling (and profitable) menu items
• Drastically reduces the time managers and staff spend on calculating and ordering  inventory by automating these calculations based on complex data from your historical sales, your recipes, reported waste, and measurable trends, and
• Standardizes the logic behind inventory calculation, enabling rapid small adjustments to the configurations and optimization of final PAR recommendations

MarketMan does this by using predictive analytics, sophisticated algorithms that can accurately help you forecast demand and automate your inventory management. Predictive analytics is a powerful data collection and reporting tool in Suggestive Ordering that helps you make more informed strategic decisions to optimize inventory management and decrease Cost of Goods Sold (COGS).

By setting a dynamic PAR level, the restaurant can ensure that it has enough inventory to meet demand without overstocking and wasting resources.

Here's how dynamic PAR level ordering works in practice:

• Historical consumption data is collected for each inventory item over a period of time, say between 1 to 5 weeks
• An intelligent demand forecast can be then defined for each menu item. This forecast can be updated manually by users, or by using 3rd PARty forecasting tools like Deputy or Tenzo. Marketman’s Suggestive Ordering feature doesn’t apply any forecasting logic independently, it uses your current prediction logic.
• Based on the demand forecast, a dynamic PAR level is set for each inventory item. This PAR level is automatically updated as new data is collected and analyzed.
• By setting a dynamic PAR level, you can optimize inventory levels and reduce food waste. This strategy ensures that you have enough inventory to meet demand without overstocking and wasting resources.

Predictive analytics and dynamic PAR level ordering can be valuable tools for restaurants looking to improve their inventory management processes. By using these techniques, restaurants can better understand customer demand, optimize their inventory levels, and reduce waste, all of which can lead to improved efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Screenshot: The ability to update configurations for items in the inventory item side modal. For HQ users, this can be updated for multiple locations as bulk.

The value Suggestive Ordering offers is tremendous management time savings, fewer errors in inventory management, and a drastic reduction in food waste.

For more information on if Marketman’s Suggestive Ordering is right for you, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us.

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