Predion Production

Unlike manufacturing companies who generally have a known book of business for whom to produce, retailers, restaurants, foodservice and hospitality companies have to produce against unknown, fluctuating and non-contracted demand. Whether it’s deciding how many loaves of bread to bake onsite in an grocery store, how much food to prep for tonight’s dinner, or how many items to precook in the next 15 minutes to manage the lunch rush in a QSR outlet, many companies, especially those serving food, have frequent production decisions to make, distributed across hundreds or thousands of locations, with high profit leverage.

 

Historically this has been controlled using simple production templates and rules, but there is a limit to how effective that can be, leading to waste from overproduction and missed sales and/or slow speeds of service from underproduction.

 

It is now possible to apply the same approaches, and often the same datasets, used to optimize labor and inventory decisions to this production problem. This requires developing reliable forecasts of underlying customer demand by product by time, as well as employing a data-driven analysis of the costs of both over- and under-producing.