Owning one restaurant can feel like a pain with all you need to manage. The building itself, your customers, your staff, the food, and a million other little complaints that often have to be dealt with quickly. Whenever you have multiple units that you need to worry about, these problems can get out of hand until you’ve got wasted money and wasted stock.

Most of the issues start and end at inventory restaurant management, and thankfully there are a lot of strategies you can use to ensure that your restaurants can keep up with all the problems. Because if you can get the inventory side of things figured out, then everything else will have a much easier time falling into place. Here are some of the best tips that you can use.

Centralize Your Systems

Having multiple units and multiple locations means trouble. If you’ve got three units that aren’t talking to one another and are all running into the same problems, then you’ve got the problem. Rather than having several different systems all being run independently of one another, the best strategy is to put it all in one place. Get a system where you can see all the numbers and data and information in one place and stick with that.

That way, if a problem starts in one of the units, you can see it and respond now rather than having to stumble upon it later. Additionally, a unified inventory management system will help you track your stock in real time without having to worry about constantly over or understocking due to mistakes.

Most of your issues will either be solved or seen when you get all your units on the same network and communicate effectively. So give it a try and find a system that works for you.

Control Your Ordering And Receiving

The restaurant life is hectic and always changing, and what is popular one day isn’t always popular the next. So in order to ensure that you aren’t overbuying and potentially wasting your stock, you need to get an eye on what is coming in and out. Conducting regular inventory audits and tracking what has come in first and what needs to be used right away is something that can help prevent waste across the board.

Additionally, using data to figure out what quantities of food need to be ordered and when can also help you handle large spikes in demand. Once you have the stock, put together a dedicated inventory receiving plan to get it where it needs to be. Then you can make sure the oldest items are used first before they go bad.

Hire A Multi-Unit Manager

There is enough to do in the restaurant world that delegation is a necessity. For inventory management, you need to look for a trusted multi-unit restaurant manager that will get a birds eye view on the entire operation that you have. The multi-unit manager will support your restaurant managers, help set business goals, monitor the restaurant performance and employee training, and make sure that all procedures are followed across all your locations.

Having a manager to handle all the day to day operations will ensure that you’ve got your finger on the pulse of your restaurants, and that means you’ll have a direct line to your restaurant inventory management as well.

Pool Resources To Handle Inventory Issues

One of the best benefits of having multiple units of inventory is that you have a lot of data to work with. Especially since your restaurants can work together in order to confront and control issues. For example, if you have an excess of breakfast foods that need to be used quickly, you could try running a marketing promotion for cheaper breakfasts. If this goes well at one location but the inventory still isn’t being used fast enough, you can transfer the excess items to another unit and run the same promotion there.

Additionally, the data you collect could also help you confront the issue of food waste. If you see that there is a problem with a supplier or with how the food is being stored in one unit, it is very likely affecting the others. Then you can make one sweeping change to boost efficiency across all your locations rather than tackling the problem one location at a time.

Train Your Employees

Often, some of the biggest mistakes in restaurants come from human error. Whether things are miscounted, stored improperly, or an order just never arrives or comes too early, you need to make sure that those mistakes are corrected. Taking the time to properly train your employees on how to use the software your systems are on, and also how to provide accurate counts to that system, will reduce mistakes and waste.

Keep the process easy and simple, and stress the importance of writing everything down so you have an accurate count at any time. If you can get your employees well trained, they will give you all the information that you need. Then you can use that information to make the big picture decisions.

Keep On Improving It

Finally, inventory management strategies are never ‘one and done.’ Instead they are constantly growing and evolving as your restaurant units do. So don’t be afraid to constantly make changes and seek to have the system and your strategies be as effective as possible. The harder you work at running a tight ship and ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks, the more you can focus on getting back to running your restaurants without any major issues. But it all starts at the inventory, so make sure you are giving your inventory management systems the serious time they deserve.

It will make your restaurant better, your customers happier, and it will also ensure that all that good food gets on the table. Sure, changing your restaurant inventory management strategies might be worrying, but if it adds more to your bottom line, then implementing them is worth it!