During our hospitality career, we’ve noticed that hospitality professionals do not have tools to efficiently gather and aggregate inventory data. Therefore, professionals have limited options to make data-driven business decisions. Data required for proper analysis was dispersed over different data-storing technologies. No Spoilers development is based on clients and users interviews, insights and needs. We know, that we are right, when clients ask when we can implement it, not how much money does it make. Our solution was recognized on various competitions (Startup Europe Awards), industry events (Better Bar, Gastro Meet-up), press (Forbes) and on European Union level (Seal of Excellence).
Target: Hospitality
Fields of Interest: Develop environmental sustainability tools, Obtain and maintain quality of service parameters/improve automate operations
Provided Technologies: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Data Analysis, Sustainability
Company Website: https://www.nospoilers.ai/
Name of Responsible Person: CEO
E-Mail: michal@nospoilers.ai
Address: Poland
Country: Poland
Problem Description
Hospitality businesses do not have tools to efficiently gather data regarding stock levels. Managers and owners do not have tools to measure how much inventory they have in storage, how much products arrive at their venues (invoice information are not the same as the real amount of products delivered), how much resources are wasted in the storage and production phase. What does it mean for the industry? Managers spend hundreds of hours per year to gather basic data, with pen and paper, required for analytics and decision making. Managers spend hundreds of hours per year to put (by finger) collected data to point of sale system or other storage managing software. If data collected by managers is not reliable (counting errors, misreads, inaccurate measuring method), then resources spend on point 1. and 2. are wasted. Collected business data must be accurate to bring the value of information to the business owner. Proper decision making, and future success or failure, relies on this data. Managers spend hundreds of hours per year to find out where their business loose products (money). The problem solved by No Spoilers is a sum minor problems that make inventory management in hospitality businesses so difficult. We bring data-gathering activity to a professional level. Users use No Spoilers mobile application to identify products with bar code scanning or identifying by name of a product. Then, users either put the product on No Spoilers smart scale that connects with the mobile application via Bluetooth (BLE) or enter the number of products. Data gathered with the mobile application goes to No Spoilers cloud platform, where our algorithm calculates final values (amounts) of products. The algorithm takes various factors into consideration: type of a product, density, alcohol and sugar content, package weight and package weight variances and package closure weight. No Spoilers algorithm calculates the product amount based on recipes - it's extremely useful for kitchens and crafted products. Since we have solved the problem of data gathering, there was also the problem of report generation. A basic report in a hospitality business consists of inventory levels, storage usage and storage incomes. To generate such reports, all three groups of data need to be gathered on one platform. Storage usage data comes partially from point of sales system that records sales data. But, storage usage data is also hidden in different areas - production food waste, employee mistakes, inaccurate recipes, expired and spoiled products, theft and mismanagement. All 'usage' that is not recorded on point of sale (PoS) system. No Spoilers gathers non-sale storage usage with the waste monitoring device (it's described below). Supplies orders are imported to No Spoilers with OCR (optical character recognition) and sales data from PoS are imported to No Spoilers through the data import module. This is No Spoilers advantage over report generation in PoS systems. No Spoilers helps users to collect data as easy as it can be. Most of PoS systems require manual data input. Currently, No Spoilers allows users to generate supply order lists automatically. No Spoilers compares current inventory level with desired inventory level and based on this information generates a supply order that can be sent to a supplier.
Solution Description
No Spoilers solves two major inventory control problems in the hospitality business. First is inventory level data collecting on three surfaces. Bars & restaurants are quite unique regarding terms of stock control. In those places, various products are sold by portion - food products, spirits, liquors, soft drinks. Usually, each venue has around 300, up to 400, opened product containers. It means, that during inventory control, each opened container is separately measured and the result is written in a calculation sheet. It takes a lot of work to manage inventory in the hospitality business - from our experience, it is around 40 man-hours per inventory control, and good business practice is to inventory control premises once a week. Inventory control without professional tools is an expensive process with doubted accuracy. Unfortunately, there are no accurate and easily affordable solutions in the market. They are either extremely expensive or archaic and inefficient.
Maturity: 5
Impact: 4