Inventory Management

Case Study

Eliminates manual errors and improves visibility to prevent stock issues, boost profits, and streamline inventory management.

One-Time Problem Statement of Customer

A client in the food services domain was facing complex inventory and profitability challenges. Operating from a centralized warehouse in Delhi, he supplied raw materials to over 20 canteens located across various universities and colleges in North India. The key issues included:

Lack of real-time inventory tracking across multiple locations.
Difficulty in correlating raw material consumption with the number of meals served.
No centralized view of operational expenses and profitability.
Inability to track perishable goods sourced locally.
Manual records and delayed reporting affecting cost optimization.

Additionally, a major university with 12 hostels (800-1500 students per hostel) approached us with a similar challenge-to digitize and streamline their food service operations and eventually integrate access control to accurately track student meals.

Our Findings

After detailed discussions with stakeholders, we identified the following:

Inventory tracking was being done in silos, with limited visibility of daily transfers and consumption.
Procurement planning was reactive and based on historical trends, not real-time data.
Meal consumption was not quantified effectively; thus, it was hard to calculate per-unit costs.
Perishable items were bought locally but not tracked systematically.
There was a growing need to tie inventory data with student access to mess for better transparency and auditing.

Construct of Solution Architecture

We developed a cloud-based inventory and consumption tracking system with the following components:

Centralized Inventory Module for managing bulk purchases at the Delhi warehouse.

Goods Issue Workflow to track material transfers to each remote canteen.

Local Procurement Module for each canteen to handle perishable item purchases.

Consumption Configuration Engine to define raw material usage per dish (BOM – Bill of Material).

Meal Count Interface integrated with daily reports to calculate raw material consumption based on the number of meals served.

Profitability Dashboard showing cost vs sales, along with expense tracking and comparison.

University Customization: Hostel-level consumption logs, and plans for turnstile/face match integration to capture student meal access.

The system was designed with plug-and-play modules and real-time sync to ensure data availability at all levels without heavy infrastructure requirements.

Realities on Ground and How They Were Overcome During Installation and Commissioning

Some key challenges and resolutions:

1

Resistance from kitchen staff: Hands-on training and simplified mobile/tablet interfaces were introduced

2

Perishable local purchase tracking: Lightweight purchase entry screens were added with mobile support.

3

Dish-to-raw-material mapping complexity: A recipe manager module was built for chefs/admins to define item-wise consumption easily.

4

Delayed reports: Real-time dashboards and auto-scheduled email reports solved this issue.

5

University implementation: Mess staff was trained to input daily student access logs until turnstile/face match system is installed.

Recommendations Given to Management for Future Improvements

Integrate turnstile or face-recognition-based mess access for live student meal count.
Introduce predictive analytics to forecast demand, reorder levels, and optimize procurement cycles.
Deploy AI-powered generative reports for identifying consumption patterns, peak usage times, and supplier-wise performance.
Integrate with existing accounting or ERP system for end-to-end business visibility.

Conclusion

The solution significantly improved inventory transparency, reduced wastage, and enabled accurate profitability measurement. The client is now able to:

Monitor inventory and consumption in real-time across 20+ locations.
Get alerts on stock-out, over-consumption, and local purchase thresholds.
Plan purchases better and track expense vs. revenue per canteen or hostel.

Case Study