By Stewart Maranello|Jun 17, 2024|9:35 am BST

At Fourth we have spent the last couple of decades enabling hospitality operators to streamline processes and maximise profits. Our AI-driven Scheduling solution is used by businesses big and small to forecast demand, automate scheduling, and increase labour efficiency. Now, we’re bringing those capabilities to inventory management with our AI for Inventory feature. Purpose-built for the hospitality sector, it can accurately predict demand for every item on your menu.

This new release forms part of our Level Up product release, a range of new features designed to deliver impactful upgrades to customers across their back-office operations. It is intended to help hospitality operators successfully navigate the unprecedented challenges facing them today. April’s increase in the National Living Wage and rising business rates mean operational costs are skyrocketing. Food inflation remains high and this, coupled with the increased cost of labour, requires operators to increase efficiencies among already stretched front- and back-of-house teams.

Food waste represents another sizeable operational cost, estimated at over £680 million a year for UK restaurants. Reducing this by just 15% can translate to as much as two percentage points on margins – a considerable improvement for those seeking to increase profitability.

However, addressing these issues is easier said than done. Restaurant inventory practices are still overwhelmingly manual, with stock counting, processing invoices, and calculating goods-to-purchase volumes typically done in spreadsheets or even on paper. Most operators understand that leveraging digitisation, data and automation will be critical in addressing many of the issues currently facing them, and enabling them to reduce the workloads on teams, deploy labour more efficiently and minimise waste. Fourth’s most recent Business Confidence Survey found that 61% of leadership teams in the industry intend to adopt new technologies this year to address mounting financial pressures, and improving inventory management is the top priority. Ensuring recipe and menu compliance and optimising supplier management also rank highly. Successfully automating all three will translate into higher efficiencies across the board and a reduction in operational costs.

Introducing AI for Inventory

We are confident AI will be fundamental to enabling operators to master the current set of challenges and opportunities they are presented with. Accurately predicting demand is key to driving efficiency and controlling costs – AI understands the nuances of your business, anticipates the impact of external events, and provides predictive insight into likely future outcomes. Fourth’s AI for Inventory is embedded into our inventory management platform, allowing operators to quickly adopt AI with minimal effort. Our proprietary algorithm is purpose-built for hospitality and is trained on one of the largest datasets in the industry. This means it provides useful, targeted insight from day one. Over time, the platform will also learn from new data and actions, increasing its accuracy as its knowledge of your business grows.

AI for Inventory works by generating highly accurate demand forecasts at an item level, enabling teams to be exact in their purchasing, inventory management and food preparation. Operators can now order the precise amount of ingredients they need to meet demand each day without risking over or under-ordering. This ensures maximum availability of menu items while reducing food waste and the overheads associated with it.

The platform also takes the heavy lifting out of invoice processing, another highly manual aspect of inventory management. AI Invoice Processing, another new addition to our inventory management technology, can automatically extract information from scanned invoices and log the data in the system, matching supplier invoices to orders and flagging inconsistencies for the team to review. For operators processing hundreds of invoices a week, this saves huge amounts of time, while also reducing errors and simplifying processes.

Fourth’s AI for inventory module successfully automates manually intensive tasks, providing an accurate demand forecast that teams can use to inform inventory management, and takes the heavy lifting out of processing invoices. It complements the existing automation and productivity-saving features our customers are familiar with. Features like digital inventory tracking, which limits the need for daily stock-taking and provides alerts when items are running low or nearing use-by dates. Or our supplier management features, which simplify the process of finding the best prices and available ingredients, making it even easier to achieve cost savings without creating additional work for procurement teams.

Levelling up hospitality

AI-driven forecasting and document processing are fast becoming the norm and are already delivering efficiencies and cost benefits to supply chains in various industries. Fourth’s new Level Up product launch brings this technology to the hospitality industry with an intelligence and suite of tools built specifically for the sector, helping businesses big and small to jump-start their AI journey.