If the pandemic has proven anything, it’s the importance of managing inventory at retail operations, commissaries, and distribution centres. Good communication between these sites is more critical than ever in the face of quickly changing distribution cycles and consumer preferences. This is why Invafresh’s Commissary Fulfillment module revolves around the following best practices:
- Providing grocery retailers with a layer of intelligence and automation to their production planning.
- Removing the complexity of in-store and commissary production planning as well as reducing scale and labor intensity.
- Offering the tools needed to help stores, production facilities, and distributors manage supply and demand as their systems become more complicated.
However, before looking into our Commissary Fulfillment solution, it’s important to first understand what your current solution provides and whether it meets your specific needs for your operations. At Invafresh, we find that the simplest approach is to look at the workflow of each segment of the distribution cycle.
Inventory Management and Operations
From store orders to production planning to commissary replenishment, our AI-enhanced forecast engine accurately senses demand to power your workflow automation and data-driven operations.
- Utilize our demand-driven replenishment capabilities to gain real-time data on your fresh inventory balance of on-hand quantities at the store level. This ensures the most accurate production recommendations for your commissary operations.
- Track and manage all item inventories, including Work-in-Progress (WIP) items produced on demand or stored in inventory. Keeping an accurate inventory of your items helps highlight potential shortages, reducing the need to short orders.
- Computer-Generated Orders (CGO) leverage intelligent forecasts to deliver accurate orders for raw materials, including food, packaging, and supplies. This minimizes shrink caused by spoilage and short orders.
Ordering
- With store ordering integration, commissary users can monitor and manage orders in real time – improving the communication between stores and commissaries.
- The order portal offers visibility to store orders before order cut-off. This lets commissary admins manage or add special orders with approval.
Production
- Reduce the complexity of large-scale manufacturing by easily monitoring daily operations – including production deadlines, fill rates, and distribution statuses – to ensure smooth and on-time operations.
- Maintain the freshest stock by creating auto-generated pick lists. These can be used simultaneously by multiple employees for products made in-store or at a commissary.
- Coupled with our Recipe Management solution you’ll benefit from product costs, data sheets, quality control, regulatory nutrition, and ingredient labels to ensure a single source of truth for recipe data. This includes all channels such as ecommerce, scales, and other systems.
- Ensure sufficient inventory to meet future demands by managing the production of regularly produced products.
- Visualize recipe costs by food, labor, and packaging while analyzing the effects of margins on price. This lets retailers stay informed and adapt to changing costs.
Food Safety and Compliance
- Trace the movement of food products and their ingredients by documenting and linking their production, processing, and distribution. This becomes extremely important in the event of a recall.
- Centrally create, print, and maintain compliant labels across scales and printers. This is vital when dealing with allergens.
Reporting
This segment can typically be overlooked since it’s not part of the immediate cycle, but it’s just as important to manage what happens after a product is produced and reaches the store!
- Determine the best allocation of extra products using ML and AI, which lowers cost, risk, and waste.
- Improve your daily planning and labor management by defining labor requirements and rates by recipe. An absolute must-have, all production line managers will appreciate!
Conclusion
Today’s fast-paced, ever-changing world demands a solution to ease the pressure created by the current supply chain and labor market. Invafresh’s commissary module gives you a centralized approach to your commissary operations, allowing you to efficiently manage recipes, quality control, pricing, sourcing, nutrition labeling, and more.
It’s easy to see how an AI-enhanced, demand-sensing forecast engine like Invafresh is the smart solution. It’s time to make complex decisions easy with Fresh AI.
