It’s no secret that if you run a bakery, restaurant, café or any other business that offers fresh food or FMCGs, you will certainly experience both extremes in regards to supply and demand. There will be days in which you over-produce quantities and are left with an excess, as well as days in which you sell out your stock before the end of lunch.
As such, it’s becoming ever more important to build better supply chains, storage and shelving solutions, which can ensure you have the goods, produce and ingredients you need to cater to the often erratic modern consumer.
The Typical Process
In a typical supply process, as shown at Supply Chain Beyond, each part of the process is separate, with store inventory, data analysis, vendor response and delivery being different parts that rely on each other. This, however, is inefficient since each part has to be completed one stage at a time. This way, if each part requires one day, it would take a total of four days to receive the delivery after running out of stock.
The Modern Approach
In our modern age, however, distance is negligible for communications, which means that we can almost instantly send all of the data as it is generated. As such, if you can create a trusted network between your store, your warehousing and your suppliers, these processes can all be completed simultaneously. This of course leaves only the delivery after the first day, which means the total time from running out of stock can be cut down to two days.
