With the growth of out-of-home eating and increasing pressures on customers’ time, getting your fresh-to-go food offering just right is critical.

In-store production planning with BakePlan ensures that your fresh food products are made just in time to ensure maximum availability reduced waste, improved quality and increased sales.

BakePlan is a cloud-based solution that works well with any ERP system. Here are seven good reasons to talk to us about in-store production planning with BakePlan today.

Better availability means increased customer satisfaction

BakePlan analyses historical/live and usage data to map a dynamic daily sales profile for each product so that production plans reflect customer demand. BakePlan’s multi-wave planning guides staff to prepare products hot out of the oven, fresh and on the shelf throughout the day.

With BakePlan, the freshest possible product is on the shelf when your customer walks through your door, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and conversion in a competitive sector.

Waste where you want it

Waste targets at store and product level are built into BakePlan’s algorithms. This maintains acceptable waste levels on key product lines while cutting waste on high price-tag, low margin lines.

BakePlan analyses historical and live sales and usage data to calculate multiple production waves throughout the day in a way that is not practical manually. Staff assumptions about consumer preferences (i.e. trade-offs/most preferred alternatives) are corrected and each production wave is optimised for maximum potential sales. This cuts waste by at least 20%.

BakePlan stops staff from overreacting to perceived trading patterns. For example, pasties are selling well so staff might double the amount they are supposed to bake off when, in fact, they should only increase production by, say, 30%, leading to high waste.

Dynamic planning

Staff tend to blindly follow old-style static production plans, paying no attention to actual trading patterns. An unresponsive, static plan may tell them to bake 100 pasties, so they do – even though sales are unexpectedly low that day. The result is high waste.

Live sales data is used to adjust production throughout the day. This means that the final production waves of the day do not consist of mainly surplus goods.

Improved profitability

By putting the right goods on sale at the right times in the right positions, sales are optimised with each production wave, boosting basket spend. Head office sets rules based on actual sales data having considered the profitability of each SKU.

With BakePlan, you improve the availability of high volume, high margin lines and minimise wastage on lower volume, lower margin items. Head office monitors orders and outcomes in order to refine BakePlan’s algorithms, improving the profitability of each line even further.

Ensure staff compliance

Most retailers have no means of monitoring compliance with food production plans, i.e. ensuring that colleagues make the products that the business needs them to make.

This is a real problem. Even if a retailer has excellent plans designed to control waste, they are worthless if they are ignored by their staff. BakePlan has been designed so that staff buy into the solution – and if they don’t, you know about it.

Cloud-based, secure and easy to use

BakePlan is an easy-to-use, cloud-based solution hosted on the Microsoft Azure Platform. It integrates with any ERP or business management application. Automated backups and security come as part of the service. BakePlan works on any web-connected device – PDA, phone, tablet, PC.

Easy to integrate, off-the-shelf solution

With BakePlan, there’s no need to reconfigure your ERP system or hire consultants to install high-cost ERP add-ons. BakePlan is an off-the-shelf solution that has been designed for fast implementation. The result of decades of industry expertise, BakePlan is a clearly defined application with strong business benefits that uses microservices to deliver proven results.