Tajimaya is a Japanese hot pot restaurant offering individual hot pots. Currently, it is running four branches in Hong Kong, featuring premium Wagyu beef imported from Japan and overseas as well as a wide variety of shabu-shabu broths as its signature. Customers can enjoy various fresh ingredients from its self-service bar, such as fresh vegetables, meatballs, side dishes and sauces, allowing them to freely mix-and-match ingredients for creating their unique and personalized hotpot styles. This unique dining experience is particularly popular among hot pot lovers who value personalised tastes and dining pace. With the expansion of the brand, Tajimaya requires higher standards and efficiency in their procurement workflow and overall efficiency to support the brand’s rapid growth.
Hotpot restaurants usually face complex procurement and inventory management due to its fast-moving and wide variety of fresh ingredients, making it challenging to effectively handle daily purchases and stock manually such as via WhatsApp, handwritten orders or Excel processing. This manual operation often leads to invoice mismatches and loss of control over food cost as it is difficult to maintain accuracy and efficiency. The purchase team has to trace order history and invoices via WhatsApp conversations, and often engage in back-and-forth communications with frontline staff to reassure order details. Such practice makes the procurement process cumbersome and error prone as it highly relies on individual memory and experience. In case of staff turnover, daily operations can be easily disrupted which imposes higher risk in management. As the number of branches grows, the client finds it difficult to keep up with the procurement and inventory data and costs across outlets without a consolidated platform, making precise cost control and effective procurement management difficult. Also, cumbersome manual reconciliation and reporting consume most of the time and efforts, which hinders menu optimisation, customer experience improvement and mid-to-long term strategy planning. Most importantly, Tajimaya seeks deeper integration and synergy between existing systems, including POS, procurement and inventory management and FlexAccount (Financial management) to improve data integration and interdepartmental collaboration.
Working alongside Tajimaya, FOODIVAL drives digitalisation through the following key areas:
provide industry-centric system design tailored to the operational needs of Tajimaya by transforming manual procurement operations involving WhatsApp, handwritten records and Excel processing to a systematic, standardised and digitalised process where every step is traceable and accountable, ceasing reliance on individual experience and memory.
allow Tajimaya to manage purchase orders, deliveries, invoices and stock across all outlets through a single consolidated platform. The procurement team is able to search and access real-time data by different criteria such as by suppliers, branches or dates, significantly improving invoice reconciliation efficiency.
Automatically integrate purchase orders, GRNs and invoices data to identify disparities and abnormalities such as mismatched amounts or quantities, helping Tajimaya to improve reconciliation accuracy with reduced human error.
Offers a wide range of reports and cost analysis such as procurement cost, stock movement and wastage reports to help Tajimaya monitor procurement costs and outlet performance for more precise purchasing and margin control.
Integrate various systems, including POS, FlexAccount – Financial Management System and BridgeBuilder HRMS – Human Resources Management for building an ecosystem. With the ecosystems, all interdepartmental data, including supplier invoices, POS sales data, labour costs and more, can be synchronised and integrated daily into FlexAccount for in-depth analysis and generating sales reports, allowing the client to gain real-time visibility into daily revenue and overall operational performance while enhancing operational transparency and business analytical capability. This effectively helps get rid of lag in data analysis commonly seen in the F&B industry so that the management can instantly spot profitability and losses at a glance.
FOODIVAL helps you take full control and gain complete visibility of your restaurant’s daily operations, from food cost to daily supply chain and stock management.
