9 Ways Your Procurement Team Can Do More with Less

These days, many operators are having to cut their staff and their budget to maintain profits and keep their doors open. With our industry quickly moving into the technology age, what if we said there was a way you could get real-time visibility into all your products, verify every price for contract compliance and make quick, accurate procurement decisions without paying for multiple tools and hiring extra staff?

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds and has made the collection of restaurant data, both customer and internal data, much easier. InsideTrack is the most effective data cleaning and normalization platform in the foodservice industry. We ensure that your data is correct, consistent and usable by identifying any errors or corruptions. When data is cleaned and normalized, operators earn more rebates and get access to better insights and intelligence about their operations.

Here are the many ways InsideTrack can help your procurement team do more with less.

Spend Management

Your operations purchasing department can generate a huge amount of data every day. From invoice data, pricing data, inventory levels, location spend details, contract utilization, rebate values, and countless others, the amount of money you spend is recorded in many places. Having complete visibility into your spend helps to make quick and accurate decisions for your business.

InsideTrack’s Spend Management tools make accessing purchasing data more organized and useful. The Spend Management Platform tracks spend data in real time and allows users to run customized reports in any configuration needed: by category, location, time frame, manufacturer or vendor. This information is securely stored and easily accessible for daily check-ins, project meetings or end-of-quarter assessments.

Data Management

How can an operation aggregate all their data from several channels and quickly turn it into actionable insights to improve their business? We’re sure many operators are tired of having to go through multiple data sources to grab their insights and are probably asking themselves this very question.

With InsideTrack, you will be well on your way to understanding all your data and putting it to good use to make better business decisions. We take in raw transactional data from multiple sources and normalizes every line item that our clients purchase back to a single key data point – a dream come true for operators. Once our clients’ purchasing data is cleaned and normalized, a world of analytical opportunities arises to help optimize contracts, reduce your costs, and gain insights into foodservice and purchasing operations.

Reports and Dashboards

Translating your data into visualizations such as dashboards and interactive reports that highlight patterns of positive or negative results can give you a better picture into the actions that need to be taken at the operation level. Having a single view into all aspects of your operation and supply chain can ensure mistakes are identified quicker.

Gathering and cleaning data is only half the battle. InsideTrack organizes purchasing data into easy-to-read dashboards that put our clients procurement issues right at their fingertips. Our pre-built reports provide insight into purchases by time period, location, and category, and compare purchasing data to commodity markets, monitors contract compliance, updates rebate claims, payments and more. Reports can be customized, saved, or favorited.

Contract Management

There is a definite art to the negotiating of contracts and determining the best cost-saving strategy. It’s important to know your numbers and understand which negotiated agreements are working for your company and which ones are best left unrenewed.

As an operator, you’re always looking for ways to increase efficiency. These days, purchasing executives are required to do more with less, leaving them with more responsibilities, but certainly with less time. InsideTrack offers services that save operators time, including researching and executing RFPs, negotiating direct contracts, implementing contracts into distribution, conducting purchase order vs usage analysis, monitoring contract compliance, consulting on SKU rationalization, and reviewing contract impact analyses. Our latest technology release gives clients access to a contract workflow module as well as a custom RFP builder.

Auditing

Who has the time to audit these days? Electronic Invoice Auditing by InsideTrack ensures that you are paying the correct prices for every item on every invoice. Through digital reports to distributors, credits and price corrections are quickly resolved to fully maximize the value of all negotiated contracts.

Identify mistakes and make corrections quicker! InsideTrack’s Pre-Audit proactively corrects mistakes and helps clients achieve more accurate pricing. Our price verification team reviews pricing on order guides before the month begins to fix any pricing errors before the operator is incorrectly billed. This eliminates the need to seek credits once overcharges have already occurred.

Conduct price verification analyses on all your invoice data. It is possible to obtain historical purchases to audit extended periods of time. Overcharges are verified with the distributor, and the agreed overcharges are then credited to the customer. Proof of credit and location breakdowns are provided to ensure credits can be properly allocated. We work to correct errors and anticipate that overcharges decrease over time, improving operational efficiency, reducing costs and ensuring future compliance.

Rebate Management

Who doesn’t want to earn cashback or increase savings? Our custom-built software application organizes and stores manufacturer rebate programs on each unique client portal for easy access. The software scans through all invoices and identifies all rebate-eligible items. Rebates are then processed for the maximum revenue available. New rebate opportunities are also identified for extra savings. Our services include filing client owned rebates as well as Buyers Edge Platform rebates. InsideTrack grants full control of the management of clients’ rebate checks.  Clients receive alerts when rebate checks are available and check breakdown information is instantly available on the InsideTrack client portal.

Billing, Collecting and Paying

Just because you have filed for a rebate, does not mean it goes directly back to your operations bottom line. Foodservice operators can spend months chasing rebate payments. The InsideTrack rebate collection team files the rebate billing and then follows up on the billing with the manufacturer. Our vendor relationships and diligent data management ensure that all rebates are accurately tracked, accurately filed, and promptly paid, with 100% client visibility. We also provide proper allocation by location to simplify the process and achieve accurate cost of goods. Sounds too good to be true? Well, we are here to say its true and you can rest easy knowing we’ve got the rebate process handled for you.

Inventory Management

Running a full service operation, you never want to run low on inventory or run out of the products your operations uses every day. Having the ability to interface directly with our clients’ distributors to keep a daily record of stocking information on proprietary items such as custom logo disposables, sauces, dressings and specialty items is important. Our systems monitor inventory and par levels and alert clients and distributors when stocks are low, prompting easy re-orders and re-stocking.

InsideTrack’s inventory management tool automatically tracks our client’s in-house inventory levels.  Chefs and General Managers can utilize our tool to track inventory every time they order and receive products, instead of having to conduct a large inventory at the end of each month or quarter.  Keeping an ongoing inventory makes it easier to conduct more accurate forecasting, to place insightful orders, maintain par levels, prevent food waste and solve utilization or shrinkage issues. Our inventory tool allows for customized drag-and-drop organization of all products to match our clients’ storage areas and handling practices.

Recipe Costing

Wouldn’t it be great if there was technology that already logged the prices you pay for every product you buy? What if we told you we could combine your products into recipes and calculate accurate recipe costs?

InsideTrack enables chefs to build recipes directly in our software in order to calculate accurate costs for each dish they serve.  As ingredient costs naturally fluctuate over time, recipe costs will automatically adjust, allowing for more accurate pricing, forecasting and menu development.  Our software allows for the monitoring of complex food cost components like waste, labor and yield.

Collect and Consolidate with InsideTrack

Partnership starts here! We’ve explained all the ways InsideTrack can help your procurement team do more with less. Now let InsideTrack take your membership experience to the next level. Our data processing tools, extensive library of manufacturer item-level data, compliance analysis tools, item-matching software, and billing and allocation tools help with the complex work of running a purchasing organization.

We’d love to work with you to develop a purchasing and spend intelligence solution that provides savings and insights for your operation. Tell us about yourself and let’s set up a consultation!

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