Automation: how bakeries can thrive in tough times
Barely a week goes by without the sad news of a long-established local baking business closing its doors. And yet, at the same time, newer bakery operators announce their successful expansion, often to similar locations.
Why the difference? Why are some bakeries falling by the wayside while others thrive? With the more recent and successful entrants to the baking sector, the answers often lie in their levels of automation.
Yet even in the most mechanized and modern production environment, it is still common to find staff engaged in mundane, repetitive and error-prone admin and paperwork.
These include order processing, calculating production requirements, creating production reports, updating recipes, organizing delivery routes, and typing invoices. How much time do you and your team spend on these tasks?
Every one of them, and more, can be automated away and carried out by bakery management software instead. Far less errors are made, and no effort is needed to generate business reports. And all for way less investment than most labor-saving machines in a bakery’s production environment.
Automating your admin doesn’t just save staff time, it also means that your data is organized. Decisions can be made based on numbers, rather than an element of guesswork.
Nowhere is this more important than when costing and pricing products. Ideally, you need to know all the direct costs for making any product in terms of ingredients, packaging and labor, but also energy costs, tray papers, and so on.
Calculation
This is difficult to calculate with spreadsheets at the best of times. More so, when any of these costs fluctuate. But, again, it’s a task that is easily automated. Purchasing can be integrated with your recipe costings, and ingredients prices kept up to date for you.
If you are a wholesale baker, the right system should be able to show you your margins for each product for each individual account once invoice discounts, customer-specific pricing, and order volumes are considered.
If you are a retailer, it should identify your unaccounted stock by store, provide you with profit analysis on each shop, and give you the reasons products have been wasted in every outlet.
Forecasting is another area of automation that can separate winners from losers.
Again, accurate forecasting of what you need to make of every product line, every day, in every store, is extremely hard for people. It is much easier to let software do it for you.
Rather than relying on the judgement of their shop managers, very many retailers that use Cybake also use its sales-based forecasting module to predict the amounts of products that go into each of their outlets each day.
This is a bit like taking the most diligent store manager you have ever employed, cloning them, and then putting them in charge of every one of your stores. The difference is that Cybake will always be better at mathematics, doesn’t take time off or get sick, and will never retire.
Automating admin also offers resilience. A single, clear and consistent view of your business that is understood across your bakery will help to future-proof your operations, whatever the economic climate.
Want to see how admin can be automated in your bakery? Book a Cybake demo today!
Rachel Hindle is the Global Sales & Marketing Manager of Cybake.
