How the Catering Systems software helps streamline your operations during the busy winter season
As the winter season approaches, the catering industry braces itself for the peak of holiday celebrations. Managing multiple events simultaneously, ensuring a seamless experience for customers, and keeping operations efficient become paramount. In this dynamic environment, the role of a robust catering sales and project management software cannot be overstated. This article explores how our comprehensive event and catering management software helps to address the key challenges faced by catering companies during the winter peak season, from sales and project management to team preparation and efficient kitchen operations.
Having a big picture overview of the catering event sales stages and process with the Calendar module
A successful peak season begins with meticulous planning and a clear overview of operations. Catering professionals need to understand what has been sold and offered for specific days to make informed decisions about whether to book in more catering events. Our software facilitates this crucial aspect through an intuitive calendar view where you can filter for different event statuses, for sales manager and project manager, customers and for specific time periods.
The calendar view provides a visual representation of scheduled events, making it easy for teams to identify peak days and allocate resources accordingly. In the same view, you can also quickly see the detailed stages of each event- if the staff has been allocated, prepayment invoice sent out, beverage and inventory list generated and more. This is most useful for the managers who are keeping an eye on the overall team performance.
Ensure you have the right team at the right place with the Staff Planner module
Preparing the team for the busy period ahead is essential for delivering exceptional service during the winter peak season. Our catering management system includes a staffing module, designed to streamline communication and provide insights into the workload distribution.
The HR manager plays a pivotal role in this process, entering comments in the work calendar of all employees about the anticipated busiest days. At the same time, employees can mark themselves as available in the system on the days they are available to work.
This collaborative approach ensures that the team members have more flexibility in planning their time and on the other hand, the HR team knows the availabilities ahead and can plan additional resources accordingly.
In addition, each team member can view the necessary information, which the project manager has entered, about each of the events they are going to work at, plus the totals of the hours they have worked each month and the history.
By centralizing this information, the Staff Planner module which is also available for the teams on mobile, becomes a valuable tool for optimising workforce management during the demanding winter months.
Keep an eye on the margins and cost of goods with the Products module
In today's market conditions, managing buy-in and sell-out prices are critical for catering companies. This responsibility often falls on the purchasing manager, who keeps an eye on the cost of goods and manages the prices of the menu items and other products sold. Our catering management software ensures that this access is tightly controlled through rights management, determining who can access Products module.
What is more, the purchasing manager just has to change the price once in the system, after which all new offers sent to customers will already have new prices. We know that sometimes sales managers would need to modify the prices based on the customer. This is possible in the proposal generation view, where you can apply a discount or a mark-up depending on your needs.
By centralising price management within our software, catering companies can maintain precision in their financial operations. The entire sales department remains up-to-date with the latest pricing information, contributing to better decision-making and profitability during the winter peak season where the bulk of the year’s profit is made.
Make sure your kitchen works efficiently with the smart sales functionality
Prevent overwhelming your kitchen staff by limiting the number of menu items they have to prepare on any given day. Your sales team will know which menu items they should push to the day they are selling the event to, based on the items that have already been sold to the same day. In our experience, this made a huge difference in making the kitchen operations more efficient and what is most important, the staff is happy as well.
Summarise orders to understand the demand with the Kitchen and Beverage reports
In the midst of the winter peak season, handling large number of orders can be challenging. The kitchen and beverage order reports feature in our catering sales and project management software streamlines this process, especially when it comes to summing up large and complex orders. Instead of sifting through individual orders, catering professionals can generate reports from our Calendar module with one click.
These reports offer a consolidated view of kitchen and beverage orders, providing a quick and efficient way to assess overall demand, make sure the purchasing managers have enough stock and that the kitchen knows well ahead of time what they need to order and prepare. The kitchen reports can be divided into as many sections as needed (e.g. Cold kitchen, hot kitchen, pastries etc) so the managers have the information they need without unnecessary noise.
As the winter peak season approaches, catering companies face a unique set of challenges that demand strategic planning and efficient execution. Our catering sales and project management software helps you approach the season in top form, making sure your team will be as efficient as possible and spend their time with customers rather than on time-consuming admin tasks. Based on the feedback of our customers, the catering sales and management system can help double the revenue without having to increase the headcount.
Contact us to see a demo of the platform and discuss how we can help improve the productivity of your team.
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