This typically seems something you make yourself.
Things that the most relevant (for each product):
1. How much you made today (manual data entry)
2. How much you sold today (the difference with #1 is the current stock) - preferably imported from the POS registry.
3. The prediction of the sales per hour - easy to enter and maintain in a spreadsheet.
4. The times you make your batches: the more frequent, the more flexible you are. For example: If you make them each hour, make so much that you have the estimated sales for the next 2 hours in stock. That seems a simple algorithm.
It only becomes interesting near the end of the day. After all, one hour before closing time you don't want to have a stock of twice the estimated sales for the last hour. If your stock is too low, you miss revenue (although your customers might be flexible enough to buy any product left if their preferred product is sold out). If your stock is too high, you have to trash it. Or reduce the price of the product with the biggest estimated remainder by, say, 25% in the 'daily deal' to promote the sales of that particular product.
Kees
Hello,
First of all I am new to this forum but I hope this question is perfectly valid.
We have a small cafe where along with coffee we produce and sell sandwiches, breads and small treats. We produce them in batches several times a day and put them on vitrine. They have limited shelf-live (4 to 12 hours). I am looking for a software that can:
Optimize production schedule to minimize losses (due to limited shelf life) and maximize profit
Generate reports for trashes/sells/produces of products, that we need to give authorities for quality control.
Most of profit is lost from trashing unsold products. The losses during production process - ingredients,etc. are not important. Therefore we probably just need to know optimal production schedule.
This could be integrated in POS (preferred) or be a standalone system.
Common POS seems to take in account only transactions, e.g. http://www.ncr.com/retail/petroleum-convenience/touch-points-sales-channels/food-service/pos-terminals. But they know nothing about producing the products that are on the shelf. Software like http://www.foodsoftware.com/Product_0008_01.asp?Keyword=&ViewMode=Public&NavURLs=Catalog%2Easp%3FViewMode%3DPublic%26ProductClassID%3D18%7CProduct_0008_01%2Easp%3FKeyword%3D%26ViewMode%3DPublic&NavNames=Product+Catalog%7C_IPro+Series+40+Restaurant+Inventory%2C+Recipe+%26+Menu+Software seems to provides only insights on cost of production but does not aim to help to optimize batch production plan.
Anybody familiar with the type of software we are looking for?
Maxim Zavadskiy

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