Bar Inventory Systems
Press release: 5/3/2012
Sales of bar inventory systems continue to grow rapidly in the hospitality industry. Growth in sales of bar inventory systems is a natural progression following on from high rates of adoption of electronic POS systems by bars and restaurants over the past decade.
One of the notable trends in the hospitality industry in the past decade has been the growth of sales of restaurant POS systems. According to IHL consulting group, in 2003, shipments in bar and restaurant POS systems grew by 16% over the previous year. With a majority of bars and restaurant now using electronic touch-screen POS systems, sales in bar and restaurant POS systems has slowed in recent years. In 2011, growth in sales of PC based POS retail systems was a more modest 4.5% growth (though this number is not specific to the hospitality sector).
Since market penetration of POS systems in bars has grown, growth in sales have naturally begun to slow as there are less potential new clients available that do not already have a POS system in place. As bars and restaurant become more comfortable harnessing technological improvements to improve operations, one spin off of the large number of POS systems has been the growth in sales of bar inventory systems. The logic runs as follows: bars have seen benefits of using POS systems such as improved order times, more consistent order taking (for the benefit of the kitchen) and faster billing/ payment for customers. Now that these benefits have been realized, bars are seeking to make use of the detailed sales data that these POS systems produce to make gains in other areas. Growth of bar inventory systems which integrate with POS sales data to produce more effective cost controls are a prime example of this.
Bar inventory systems provide an easy way for bars to integrate their sales data with liquor inventory systems in order to effectively compare inventory usage with sales. Prior to this development of using more sophisticated bar inventory systems, most bars and restaurant were simply using aggregated sales information to calculate liquor costs. This practice has lead to liquor inventory shrinkage levels being extremely high in many cases. Owner of Bar-i intelligent inventory (www.bar-i.com) Jamie Edwards comments, “the hospitality industry has historically tolerated levels of inventory shrinkage around 20%. The complexity of developing effective liquor inventory controls in bars, combined with the powerful incentives of tipping created a combination which has been extremely damaging to profitability. The fact that most bars now use electronic POS systems means implementing effective bar inventory systems has become much easier. While we have already seen strong growth in sales of bar inventory systems in recent years, we expect the next decade to see significant increases of sales of bar inventory systems as bars seek to reduce costs. Bars interesting in improving their liquor inventory system should perform comprehensive research since the range of bar inventory systems now available, in terms of both price and quality, is now very broad.” For details of Bar-i’s speed count liquor inventory system designed specifically for bars, bar owners and managers should go to www.bar-i.com.
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