How festive trading exposes flaws in bakers’ systems
January’s when commercial bakers take a step back, look closely at how they operated over the holiday season, and often find that their management and planning systems were lacking.
The festive period tends to spotlight just how much time they and their colleagues spent on time-consuming admin tasks, tricky calculations, errors, and just plain hassle. As bakeries reach out to us seeking solutions to these issues, we hear a few common themes each year.
For example, if you are a retail baker, how easy was it to see the stock positions on your seasonal lines in your stores in the run up to the holidays? What about working out how much you should move from stores with too much stock to those with too little?
This information is crucial when mince pies, say, are flying out of the doors of some outlets while lying relatively untouched in others. At many bakeries, head office personnel or area managers end up phoning their stores every afternoon for the last couple of weeks before Christmas to make such transfers happen.
In contrast, bakeries that manage their operations with Cybake can see their stock positions in each store, and arrange transfers, on screen at any time.
Annual orders
Another issue for retail bakers is organizing customers’ annual festive orders. These are often manually written into diaries and then hastily compiled into a master document each year. This can be an irksome and error prone way to ensure your regular customers are not disappointed for their holidays.
Cybake manages these annual orders more efficiently. It automatically adds them to production totals at the correct time and includes them in store delivery totals. The system also tells stores which special orders will be delivered each day.
Gauging how much stock to make for your stores for the holiday season while allowing for the drop in sales afterwards is also a common challenge. With our system, shops’ orders are automated and can be set to follow the same trend over the same period last year.
If week-on-week sales increased, say, 30% last year, the same uplift can be applied this year. If sales dropped 25% from December to January last year, the same reduction in orders can be applied.
Wholesale bakeries face their own issues during this hectic time. For instance, if you are a wholesale baker, how much did you struggle with production planning and compiling orders as they increased for the festive period?
Many bakeries still use spreadsheets for these tasks. These contain complicated formulas, and the amount of amends made to them in the run up to Christmas often causes chaos. Bakeries can find that they either over produce and have lots of expensive waste, or they underproduce and let their customers down.
Added to this, wholesale customers have a tendency to amend orders at the last minute. They may under-order and want to increase at short notice or vice versa. All of which is time consuming and puts a strain on order takers, with missed cut-off times.
Online ordering
The entire process is made much easier when customers place their own orders online. We set wholesale bakeries up with their own ordering portal for free as part of their standard Cybake package.
Online ordering saves time, reduces errors and attracts new business. Plus, as well as issuing invoices, delivery and packing notes, Cybake schedules online orders straight into production.
For wholesale bakeries, the season of goodwill is also the absolute worst time for baskets and dollies to go “missing”. How much of a headache did this problem cause you this year? How much will it cost to replace your equipment?
Cybake tells your customers how many of your baskets or dollies they hold on their delivery notes and invoices. Meanwhile, it keeps you updated on where your equipment should be at any time.
If any of the above festive trading issues sound familiar, we are here to help. Get in touch, and we’ll show you how Cybake can have them ironed out for when the next holiday season rolls around.
Rachel Hindle is the Global Sales & Marketing Manager of Cybake.
