Restaurants have long been underserved by technology. Today, most restaurant business processes are manual. Procuring fresh and quality products, their proper receiving, storage, issuing, consumption and then re-ordering requires a lot of effort and time from the restaurant owners. Despite the technological advancements, the food service business is still dependent on the archaic methods of ordering, purchasing and accounting.
A typical purchasing process in a restaurant business involves dealing with vendors that are highly unorganized who operate mainly on manual billings. A lot of times there is discrepancy in the items that are ordered and the items that are received at the restaurant and with all the manual challans it takes a lot of time and effort for the restaurant to track restaurant purchasing and ensure there is no over invoicing or duplication of vendor bills.
Due to the highly unorganized nature of vendor’s operations, the restaurant is often left with little choice but to comply with the inefficient system. Till today, if you ask any restaurant owner they would most likely tell you that they do not have any exact tracking of items that are purchased and received at their restaurant.
Bigger chains hire consultants and develop their customized ERPs to make it work for their operations. However, most small and medium restaurants due to limited resources cannot afford to do the same.
To solve these long due pain points, a Delhi based tech start up, Zeffu has come up come with a novel technology solution for purchase and inventory management for small and medium restaurateurs. The company has developed a Cloud-based Requisition and Purchase Order Management solution that helps restaurants to manage the entire order placing, approval, receiving of orders, billing and finance through desktop or through an easy to use mobile application.
Stand-Alone Solvers
Zeffu, developed by two entrepreneur brothers Sahil Gulati & Sahib Gulati, digitizes and automates the entire B2B operations in this sector – from ordering, receiving, inventory and accounting.
Sahil has done B.Sc, Computer Science Honors & Mathematics from Purdue University and has also previously worked with Amazon.com in Seattle. Sahib has done B.Sc in Economics & Mathematics and is an alumni of University of Southern California and London School of Economics.
Coming from a hospitality background, they knew that the restaurant purchasing process is quite unorganized in India especially for a stand-alone restaurant.
“The idea of launching Zeffu came when we started hunting for a software solution for our own family owned restaurant that could automate the redundant purchasing process. It is when we were unable to find anything suitable that could solve our restaurant’s problem of tracking restaurant purchasing and inventory, we decided to develop the solution ourselves”
Zeffu – How it works
Zeffu is a simple tool that digitizes the purchasing process and facilitates the transactions between restaurants and its vendors.
“To involve the vendor in this digitization process, we came up with a novel solution where when the order is placed by the restaurant, a SMS of order summary goes to the registered vendor’s mobile.”
By connecting restaurants with its suppliers using technology. Zeffu allows restaurateurs to digitize their entire purchasing process and allows them to take complete control of all the purchasing that is happening at the restaurant, thereby making the entire process paperless and painless.
The cloud based solution – Zeffu (that can be accessed via Web or Mobile App) automates the entire process and provides complete control to the restauranteur of the items that are being purchased and received at the restaurant.
To set up the profile, all that the restaurant has to do is to map out the vendors from which it purchases food items (one time process) and then start placing orders via the app.
Below is the list of four simple steps
- Request Orders– The kitchen staff or the required personal submits the new purchase requirement using a web browser, tablet or mobile.
- Manager Approvals– After the submission of requirement, the app sends an automated requirement summary to the approver. Now, the approver can approve, decline or edit the requirement.
Based on the approver’s decision, Zeffu sends an automated SMS and email (of requirement summary) to the vendor’s registered mobile.
- Receiving Purchased Items– When the items reach the restaurant, the store keeper just need to verify the items received from the purchase order. In case of any discrepancy, the store keeper can also edit the items received.
- Finance– The items received automatically get stored in inventory and accounts. Thereafter, Zeffu maintains all the records and order details of each of your purchase.
The analytics features also lets restaurants monitor the fluctuations of prices in the vendor bills and automatically sends update in case of variations. Apart from this, Zeffu also allows users to upload a photo of the actual bill which it stores on its cloud for better monitoring.
Zeffu’s Strategic Focus
They are quite overwhelmed by the initial traction and interests which they have received from the industry. Based in New Delhi, they offer their cloud based solutions all across the country.
One of the major challenges they had in product development stage was to ensure that their software is extremely easy to use so that it can truly transform and impact the restaurant industry.
“Our aim with Zeffu is to bring efficiency in restaurant businesses and help the industry tackle the inefficient conduct of operations which it has been facing for a long time.“
Taking constant feedback from various industry professionals helped them achieve their goal on delivering the same.
“We would be continuing developing a seamless communication tool and would be working on providing to the point reports for small restaurateurs so that they can actually analyze and take remedial action to improve their profits.”
Zeffu can empower restaurateurs as well as help them bring in standardization thus enabling them to compete with bigger chains.
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