Leveraging data analytics and machine learning is one of the biggest allies for restaurants in increasing profitability and revenue. Restaurant owners and operators need to get comfortable with using their data to aid their business rather than getting scared of it and losing out. This showcase shows how machine learning can be leveraged for two main aspects of restaurants – Food waste reduction and staff optimization. The data is from a product – Tabsquare, which is a restaurant management solution.
The slideshow below talks about the hypothesis, facts and the technologies used into building such a solution. Post the slideshow, we will talk about it in more detail.
MACHINE LEARNING SCENARIOS
The approach primarily involves setting up the hypothesis, understanding the data and then employing advanced analytics techniques to aid the business.
In order to help restaurants gain more profit, two machine learning solutions have been showcased:
1. Staff Optimization – The hypotheses behind this is that, restaurants are un-necessarily overstaffed or sometimes understaffed, due to which there is a hit on the revenue of the restaurant and the customers are also not satisfied with the level of service provided. In order to overcome this we employ machine learning to forecast the number of customers going to be present in the restaurant and number of tables which are going to be occupied in order to predict the requirement of the staff.
This being said, the restaurant management can easily decide the number of staff to keep on an hourly basis in an optimized and easy to read manner (See dashboard for details). This can cut down on the incurred costs.
2. Food Waste Reduction – One of the critical problems all around the world today is the waste of food. This starts at the initial point of purchase of the inventory itself.
What if we could reduce the unnecessary purchase of inventory? – This is exactly what we target to do, based on the historical consumption of food by the customers. Machine learning helps predict the requirement of different food categories every day, especially those with a low shelf life. This helps by reducing the stocking and hence food waste. This backtracks to less spending and hence more profit.
Now, having said all that, how can restaurant managers and high level staff use these technologies to understand such trends? The dashboard below shows exactly that, a simple easy-to-use interface to interact with.
The above dashboard shows the effectiveness of visualizing the machine learning scenarios and how it can help the restaurants in improving their business.
The advantages of having such an application deployed in the business is tremendous.
If you think such an application resonates with you, please get in touch with us today.
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