Why Use Analytics to Manage Food Vendor Relationships

Foodservice consultants can give clients the tools to manage their own vendor relationships with StoreRanker

Working with vendors who can reliably deliver the freshest meat, beautiful produce, quality dry goods, and other kitchen staples is essential for the success of any foodservice company, whether you are talking about a food truck, a five star restaurant, or an institutional kitchen.

Foodservice consultants often get called in to assist companies when they are developing, expanding, revamping, or otherwise changing their business model. Often, this means the foodservice consultant needs to connect their client with new food vendors.

When choosing a food vendor to recommend to a client, obviously you want to make sure you are working with a reliable and professional company. After all, your reputation rests on the success or failure of the systems and relationships you set up for your clients. Using analytics to track and evaluate food vendor performance will help keep vendors accountable and ensure they continue to give your clients the same high level of service even after your consulting project is complete.

5 Ways Analytics Can Improve Food Vendor Relationships

When you use analytics to gather and analyze information about food vendor performance, it gives you insight into trends that may affect the overall success of the foodservice client. By closely monitoring vendor lead times, schedules, fill rates, return rates, etc.—and comparing them to historic performance if needed—you can generate many benefits for the foodservice client such as:

• Minimizing incorrect quantities
• Reducing short deliveries
• Eliminating excess orders
• Minimizing receipt of defective, spoiled, or otherwise substandard products
• Reducing early and late deliveries

What to Look for in an Analytics Tool

Ultimately, you want to choose an analytics tool that can not only help you monitor food vendor performance during a consulting project, but also allow an easy transition to the client doing this monitoring in the future. This ensures that you leave the client with the ability to manage the vendor relationship and keep the vendor accountable.

Because many foodservice companies do not have their own IT departments, the analytics tool you choose needs to be so accessible and intuitive that anyone can use it, preferably with minimal training and no investment in new hardware. The tool should include functionalities for site audits and checklists, as well as robust reporting features.

Why Choose MyFieldAudits

MyFieldAudits is a simple yet powerful analytics tool that was specifically designed for the needs of the foodservice industry. Our cloud-based software can run on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone, allowing users to easily input data from site audits and other sources. Foodservice consultants can set up queries that clients can continue to use to generate easy-to-read reports that will give them actionable insights into their relationships with food vendors.

To learn more, contact us at info@MyFieldAudits.comtoday for a free demo.