Just like any other business, growth is a major goal for every restaurant operator. However, it’s easy to fall into a cycle of habits that prevent that growth from occurring or even cause your restaurant to slowly shut down.
To avoid all of that, many restaurants have started adopting restaurant predictive analytics to stay ahead and experience constant growth.
You can leverage that in your favor, too. Here’s how.
What is Predictive Restaurant Analytics?
Predictive restaurant analytics refers to the use of existing data, both in-house and industry-wide, to predict how your business is going to perform in the future, and what you can do to help it perform better.
This is a complicated data analytics job, and we recommend you hire a professional team to handle it. Predictive restaurant analytics are also provided in some more in-house ways. Your existing POS system, as long as it’s relatively modern, provides a form of predictive analytics by relaying how your business is performing and what stock you’re going through, among other things. When you hire a team, they’ll take the data from your POS and more to create an in-depth and comprehensive report; as well as provide industry-wide data.
Ways that Predictive Analytics can be Used for Growth
If you use predictive analytics effectively, they can help you do the following things increase your revenue and grow your business.
1: Lower Waste
Waste is one of the most detrimental things your business can deal with. Your profit margin is already small, and every wasted ounce of food cuts into that margin. Predictive analytics can help you prevent that waste by predicting what your customers are going to order in what quantities according to past trends. For example, you might find that your customers are ordering a lot of your sandwich-based breakfast menu items instead of more traditional platter items. So, you can focus more on prepping sandwich items throughout the breakfast period. You might also find that, during the holidays, certain items sell a lot more units, and you need to increase your supply of those items while decreasing the ones that become temporarily less popular.
2: Scheduling
Payroll is a massive part of your budget, and if your scheduling isn’t done perfectly, it can end up costing you way too much. That, or you can be left with too few employees to properly serve your customers; causing major problems with your customer relations.
Predictive analytics can help you dial in the number of employees you need to execute all possible business tasks at various times per day.
In its simplest form, this is like knowing to schedule more people for your dinner rush, but being able to get away with minimal staff during the afternoon hours that most people are working during. However, with restaurant predictive analytics, you can take that a step further and maximize the concept.
3: Trend Predictions
You’re probably aware of the chicken sandwich craze that took the fast-food industry by storm in recent years. The companies that got on board that early benefited dramatically, while the ones that were late to adopt new products didn’t see much profit.
With restaurant predictive analytics, you can be aware of those trends far before they actually start, and you can be one of the early adopters who profit dramatically. If you are not certain where to start, contact the best analytics company now and start your journey to perfection.