Procurement and Inventory Management

Most ERP and inventory systems were designed for factories and retail: one SKU, one unit of measure, one bill of materials. Move that logic into a kitchen and it starts to break on day one — because ingredients are not parts. Two cases of the same cut never weigh the same, a cabbage loses a third of its weight before it reaches the pan, a case of leaf vegetables is measured in days rather than months, and how much a store should order depends on whether it rains tomorrow.

RUIYI Procurement and Inventory Management is not a restaurant version of a stock ledger. It takes capabilities that are already mature in industrial operations — lot traceability, multi-site inventory, variance analysis — and rebuilds them on how food actually behaves: catch weight at the dock, yield from as-purchased to edible portion, shelf life that decides issue order, and consumption derived from recipes instead of issued against a work order. Head office sets the rules, stores act inside them, and anything outside the boundary is approved and recorded.

Catch-weight receivingTheoretical vs actual usageFEFO & shelf-life controlCentral kitchen as internal supplier

What it is

It covers one chain: catalogue and contract pricing → store requisition and suggested order → goods receiving (weighing, shelf life, temperature) → multi-site stock (lot, expiry, FEFO) → consumption (theoretical vs actual) → transfers and internal supply → invoice matching → cost and variance analysis.

It is not a system for filling in purchase forms. It is the ledger that makes what you bought and what you used add up.

• Head office sets the rules. Approved suppliers, qualification documents, the group catalogue and contract prices stay central.

• Stores act inside the catalogue. Suggested orders are generated from par levels and recent sales; the store manager confirms and adjusts. A store knows better than head office whether tomorrow is a rainy day.

• Anything outside the boundary is approved and recorded. Off-catalogue items, over-budget orders and emergency top-ups go through an approval flow, with a record of who approved what and why.

• The central kitchen acts as an internal supplier. Stores raise internal orders; the central kitchen consolidates demand, plans production, dispatches and confirms delivery — stock moves on both sides in one transaction.

• Direct-to-store delivery is still controlled. Distributor-delivered beverages and bakery items are counted, weighed and price-checked at the door instead of disappearing into a blind spot.

What gets in the way today

The pain is rarely the cooking. It is everything around it: buying at the right price, knowing what you actually hold, and being able to explain what you used.

• Store-level buying drifts. Emergency top-ups, local produce and off-catalogue purchases move price and quality quietly, one store at a time. Head office only sees the consolidated result — never the moment it happened.

• Contract price and received price drift apart. When the difference only surfaces with the invoice weeks later, the stock has already been used and nobody remembers why.

• Three-way matching is done by hand. Purchase order, goods received note and invoice rarely agree on the first pass, and finance spends the last week of every month reconciling them.

• Stock counts are cleaner than the shelf. With dozens or hundreds of stores plus a central kitchen and warehouses, the number in the system is always tidier than what is actually in the walk-in.

• Shelf life is invisible loss. Without FEFO issuing and expiry warnings, short-life items simply expire — and over-ordering is the single largest cause of that waste.

• Counts happen too late to act on. A monthly count finds a problem thirty days after it started. High-value items — meat, seafood, spirits — need daily counts; the rest need weekly ones.

• There is no work order — only variance. Manufacturing issues material against an order. Catering has nothing to issue against, so usage has to be reconstructed: what recipes and sales say should have been used, against what the count says was used. In a well-run operation that gap sits at 1–2%; above 3% it usually means something is wrong; above 5% it needs investigating now.

• Measurement happens in three layers. You buy by the case, hold stock in kilograms and write recipes in grams; fresh items are paid for on actual weighed weight; and what you buy is not what you cook with once yield is taken out. Get any one of those layers wrong and the cost is wrong.

What you get

Four things change early on: the numbers agree, losses have names, price differences are caught at the door, and ordering stops being guesswork.

Capabilities

The scope below is deployed in modules. Most groups start with catalogue, ordering and receiving, then add consumption and variance once the data foundation is in place.

How it works

1. Head office publishes the catalogue and prices. Stores build requisitions from par levels inside that catalogue.

2. The store confirms the order. Anything off-catalogue, over budget or urgent goes to approval.

3. Head office consolidates demand. Orders go to suppliers, or to the central kitchen as internal supply.

4. Goods are received and checked. Actual weight, count, expiry and temperature are recorded; price differences surface immediately.

5. Stock is held by lot and expiry. Issuing follows FEFO, expiry warnings trigger transfers or markdown before loss.

6. Usage is reconstructed and compared. Theoretical usage from recipes and sales meets actual usage from the count; variance is attributed.

7. Settlement and review close the loop. Three-way matching clears invoices, and cost, supplier and variance figures go into the monthly review.

Integration & deployment

• POS and till systems. Sales drive ingredient depletion, suggested orders and dish margin without re-entry.

• Finance and ERP. Purchase, invoice and settlement data move across in both directions.

• Scales and cold-chain sensors. Weight and temperature are captured from the device instead of copied by hand.

• Central kitchen and dispatch. Production, picking and delivery share the same item and lot master data.

Deployment model — cloud, on-premise or hybrid — and the rollout sequence are agreed during scoping, usually starting with one region or a pilot group of stores.