Crunchtime, a leading provider of operations management solutions for the restaurant industry, announced the availability of new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that enable restaurants to forecast their sales with even greater accuracy. By incorporating a custom-built machine learning algorithm into Crunchtime’s already powerful forecasting engine, the AI forecast provides restaurant teams with a new tool to more accurately predict customer demand.
Even for a seasoned general manager, forecasting sales is difficult. This wreaks havoc on a restaurant’s profitability and creates a variety of costly operational issues related to inventory, waste, and staff scheduling.
Over the past 12 months, Crunchtime has worked closely with customers to test, refine and improve its existing industry-leading forecast engine with the addition of AI forecasting capabilities. Early results have been promising with restaurants seeing an increase in forecast accuracy by up to 27% at different store locations during testing.
“The restaurant landscape has become too competitive for managers to spend all their time in the back office using guesswork to forecast sales, order food, and schedule staff,” said John Raguin, CEO of Crunchtime. “By automating this time-consuming process with AI we’re delivering even better results. At one store location, the AI forecast was within 13 cents of actual sales, and the algorithm is only going to improve over time as more data is processed.”
Crunchtime’s AI applies rigorous data science and analyzes a vast amount of a restaurant’s historical data to create a more accurate prediction of the store’s future sales, expected guest counts, and anticipated number of checks.
Forecast data is integrated throughout the Crunchtime platform, as it drives critical recommendations for managers on the ideal number of hours to schedule labor, how much food to prep throughout the day, and how much food to order from vendors.
“As an industry leader in forecasting, our focus is ensuring that restaurants have high-quality data, at the right time, for the right people, so restaurant teams can always make the best possible decisions about their food and labor operations,” said Erik Cox, VP of Product Management for Crunchtime. “AI forecasting is the first of many exciting applications of AI that our team will deliver to help restaurants and their teams thrive.”
Crunchtime’s AI forecasting is included in both the Inventory Management and Labor & Scheduling solutions.
