May 2002

Cal Poly uses software to track inventory for its campus restaurants
By H. Rae Gibbons

Time was running out for Cal Poly Foundation, (a non-profit auxiliary to California Polytechnic State University); the university realized that it needed to replace its homebuilt, non-Y2K compliant inventory control system before the year 2000 arrived. Previously, the system had successfully managed inventory for on-campus restaurants but it was falling victim to changing technology.

Located about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the relatively small city of San Luis Obispo, Cal Poly is one of the West Coast's top rated universities. The four-year, comprehensive public university is best known for its agriculture, architecture and engineering programs, and has more than 16,000 students.

On the 6,000-acre campus are 15 restaurants offering a variety of dining options for the students and faculty, ranging from a coffee shop and juice bar to resident dining cafeterias and a full service restaurant. To manage the inventory for all these restaurants, Campus dining had used a program that was designed by one of their in-house programmers. However, because the system was not Y2K compliant, a new system needed to be up and running by the beginning of 2000. Melissa Swanson, purchasing manager for Cal Poly Foundation, says the university began looking for a new solution and, at an industry trade show, discovered Eatec Corp. and its food and beverage management software, EatecNet. The software's functionality includes purchasing and receiving, online requisitions and transfers, inventory control, production management and catering orders and invoicing.

The switchover After looking at several competitive inventory software products, Cal Poly Foundation chose EatecNet not only for its added functionality, but also because the purchasing department could begin using the new system without completely modifying the inventory tracking process it already had in place with the old program. Swanson says, "Our purchasing system is not really menu-driven, which is how most other universities use this type of program. We do all the purchasing out of our office for the foodservice operations. We maintain a central warehouse system with a perpetual inventory that everybody draws upon. We work more with our inventory and par levels, and Eatec was really a good fit for that. With Eatec we didn't have to change the way we did business, which is why they were our choice," says Swanson.

Implementing the new inventory management software consisted of manually inputting all the data from the previous system, which Cal Poly Foundation achieved during the summer of 1999 while business on campus was slower than the regular school year. Swanson says, "We had our first training session in June 1999, and by the end of October that same year, we did the complete switchover and went live with the system. When everyone came back for the school year in September, we did some in-house training for them, and started building up all of our packages, which consists of each location putting together a list of the ingredients involved in the physical inventory for that location. Inventory is taken using packages, and those packages are then used to create requisitions."

Getting comfortable using the system didn't take long for the staff at the purchasing department because of the similarities between the way EatecNet functioned and Cal Poly Foundation's previous system. Eatec sent someone to the campus to train the staff in person, and according to Swanson, after going live in October, the staff was confidently using Eatec within three months.

Learn by doing
Cal Poly uses a hands-on approach to teaching, and has adopted the phrase "learn by doing" as a part of its philosophy, and therefore classes at Cal Poly include a lot of lab and fieldwork. An example of its hands-on approach in regards to campus dining is that some of the produce and cheese manufactured by the school's agriculture department, as well as the meat that comes from that department's butchery is purchased by the campus foodservice purchasing department. Eatec's software program treats those products as another food distributor, which allows the agriculture department to earn some money for what they produce, and the product doesn't go to waste.

Campus dining's primary production areas consist of a bakery, salad prep, butchery, main kitchen and a catering production area that is part of the main kitchen - the latter requisitions product from the warehouse. The on-campus dining facilities are the outlets for these production areas.

All dining production area locations enter inventory into EatecNet manually. "Inventory is entered for each location weekly by the area supervisor or one of their employees," says Swanson. Following is a list of functions that Eatec executes for Cal Poly Foundation:

• Inventory management - Able to track ingredient usage for each location with respect to purchases, transfers between intra-site locations, sales, spoilage and loss and physical inventory variance;
• Purchasing - All of campus dining's purchasing is centralized through the warehouse by one purchasing agent so each outlet makes a requisition for a supplier's goods and one purchasing agent in the warehouse takes all of the combined orders and does the purchasing for all the outlets;
• Receiving - All goods are received at the warehouse. Upon arrival of merchandise, the warehouse can verify what was received by doing a three-way match of comparing purchase orders to what was actually delivered and to the supplier's invoice. EatecNet automatically updates inventory levels and recosts recipes; Requisitions and transfers - When requisitions come in via EatecNet, the inventory quantity and value are automatically transferred from the sending to the receiving location;
• Catering - The catering office uses a sales order screen that contains all the information on events including date, location, time and a task list/dated schedule for follow-up. In addition, it shows a complete onscreen history of orders and invoices in EatecNet. EatecNet then exports the invoice records to their third-party accounting system; and
• Reporting - There are a multitude of reports that Cal Poly Foundation runs using Eatec, such as inventory reports, purchasing reports and transfer reports to spot discrepancies and exceptions - things that were requisitioned and then not transferred. These reports can be accessed on the store level, as well as the corporate level.

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