Discussion board Inventory
Would they be helpful to incorporate or would they hinder productivity?
Watch the best practices in inventory management video (under Week 6 Videos). After, discuss how you see some of the principles being applicable to your current or past business. Would they be helpful to incorporate or would they hinder productivity? Read and reply to at least two other posts applying their suggestions to another business.
(4) Inventory Management Best Practices for 2012 – YouTube
Here are two discussion which need to reply
Discussion 1
One of the practices introduced in the video that would be useful at my current workplace would be classifying inventory as Good, Bad and Ugly. In a restaurant setting, most inventory is perishable, so we do not sit on inventory for too long. That being said, we could apply the same classification to menu items, which is how we utilize our food inventory. A menu item that accounts for a significant portion of sales, but results in a lot of waste may not be a great menu item. For example, my restaurant has a fresh local fish option on the menu, and the type of fish changes based on the season. Our chefs break down whole fish into fillets, to save on cost. However, the type of fish makes a big difference. Grouper, for example, only has a 40% butchering yield, meaning that you will only end up utilizing 40% of a whole fish when selling fillets (Chefs Resources, n.d.). This will result in wasting 60% of the inventory. Even though grouper is a popular fish that customers will pay a premium for, utilizing it for the fresh fish would not be an effective management of inventory. Utilizing other fish that have a higher butchering yield, like Mahi Mahi, would be a more effective use of inventory.
The suggestion to use a new item questionnaire as part of the screening process for adding new items to the inventory is something that could also be used at a restaurant. Wine represents a significant portion of a restaurant’s inventory, as it is not perishable, so it can sit unsold from month to month or even year to year. My restaurant is a fine dining restaurant with 1500 wine selections on the list. We cellar wine, and often like to have back vintages of wine on our list. That being said, our wine director must be smart about wine purchases and adding new wines to our list. It would not be advantageous to have, for example, a vibrant Greek white wine that is meant to be drank young that does not sell and sits in inventory for a long time. A questionnaire, like the video suggested, that asks “who would this be sold to” may save the wine director from making a poor choice. If the answer to that question is not the restaurant’s typical demographic, then the wine is probably not a good addition to the wine inventory.
Resources
Chef’s Resources. (n.d.). Fish fillet butchering yields. https://www.chefs-resources.com/seafood/seafood-yields/
Daugherty, R. (2011). Inventory management best practices for 2012. [Video] YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Z3IApWCNQ
Discussion 2
When I was a senior In high school, I worked at a bakery in my town. I typically only worked with the owner and she and did a lot of work to keep the bakery running successfully. She baked, decorated, took orders, did ordering, and more. When I worked there, I knew there were issues with inventory and ordering but after watching this week’s video it is clear she needed more of a system. Sometimes when items were getting low, she would start a list or ask for me to start one, but it was either on a piece of paper that sometimes got lost or on a whiteboard. There were times when ordering was done at the very last second and therefore, we ran out of items that customers wanted. Sometimes I even had to go to the grocery store to pick up a small amount of ingredients to complete that day’s order.
Two steps that would have helped greatly that were explained in the video are planning and forecasting and order life cycle management. Since customers would make cake orders in advance, she could use the order calendar to plan out orders. A rough number of ingredients can be estimated to determine what is needed ahead of time.
In order to have a better order life cycle management system, she needed a set space to write down what was running low and what was out. A schedule of which days she would do ordering and what days an inventory check was necessary. Another thing that would be really useful would be to use the point-of-sale system or a different application to collect data on sales. Doing this would show how many of each item is sold every day. This would help inform the ordering process as well as how much of each item to bake. We would sometimes have to throw out a dozen cupcakes and some cookies because they had gone bad. If more analysis could be done on sales that could be prevented.
References
YouTube.(2011).YouTube.
Answer preview would they be helpful to incorporate or would they hinder productivity?
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