What’s the ROI on bakery management software?
If you are weighing up whether to adopt a bakery management system to run your business, you’ll want an idea on what your return on investment (ROI) will be.
Any software provider in the baking sector should be able to give you a string of facts and figures about the ROIs that their bakeries achieve. Believe me, if they are truly tuned in with their customers, they will be getting pretty much constant feedback on how things are going.
Right now, for example, I could quote a baker in Tennessee that just told me that he has saved himself an estimated $6,000 dollars a year in lost equipment simply by using our bread-basket tracking module.
Or I could point to a video we’ve just posted about a Pittsburgh bakery that reduced production labour by 5% while experiencing 40% year-on-year growth. Or I could confidently predict that you will save at least 10% on waste if you use our solution for in-store production.
These are all tangible ROIs that make hard-nosed business sense. But what about more intangible returns such as work-life balance or staff satisfaction?
Take this quote, one of my favorites, from the testimonials page on our website from Stephanie Blankenship of Importico Bakery in Florida:
“Honestly, on a personal level, it was just life-changing the amount of stress Cybake saved me. I had to work on production eight hours a day, plus work eight hours a day. That’s a sixteen-hour day. There was no way to live, it was very frustrating.”
As someone with a background in commercial baking myself, I have no doubt that the scenario painted by Stephanie will ring true with many readers.
More profits
Bakers work long and unsocial hours. And while Cybake software is, essentially, all about helping bakery owners bring more profits home, it’s also about helping them spend more time in those homes in the first place.
Indeed, the ability to work on production data, or figures, or queries from the bakery, at home (or otherwise off-site) is cited by nearly all new Cybake users as a clear benefit of using our cloud-based system.
So, if automating your business admin tasks can have a positive effect on your own work, what will it do for your staff?
Here’s where we have another intangible, but important, ROI. That’s because embracing automation doesn’t mean replacing human efforts; it means optimizing them. We only have to look at the machinery we use on bakery shop floors to prove it.
The same is true for all of the admin involved in commercial baking, from goods in, to recipes, to order-taking, to production, and right on through to delivery, invoicing, and credit notes. By automating the mundane and repetitive tasks involved in all of these tasks, you liberate your team to focus on creativity, innovation, and customer engagement.
When you consider moving to an ERP-type bakery management system, it’s important to focus on the benefits it brings to your business. But while tangible, quantitative figures should undoubtedly influence your final purchase decision, the intangible benefits should not be underestimated.
If you would like to talk about the ROIs your bakery could achieve by using an ERP-type bakery management system, please get in touch on our contact page, via the webchat below, by emailing us, or by calling us on the numbers listed at the bottom of this page.
If you would like to talk about the ROIs your bakery could achieve by using an ERP-type bakery management system, please get in touch on our contact page, via the webchat below, by emailing us, or by calling us on the numbers listed at the bottom of this page.
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Oprah Davidson is Cybake's ambassador for Northern America. She is a pro baker whose CV includes New York’s Milk Bar chain; the Institute of Culinary Education, New York; and product development for major U.S. bakery brands.
