One Network Enterprises Announces Enhancements to the Supply Chain Business Network for the Restaurant & Food Service Industry

Platform enhancements for autonomous supply chain management are being rolled out across a network of more than 75,000 companies

Dallas TX, August 21, 2019 — One Network Enterprises, a global provider of multi-party business networks for autonomous supply chain management, today announced the availability of the latest version of its Real Time Value Network™ (RTVN™) powered by NEO intelligent agents for the Restaurant & Food Service industry. This release continues to enhance the real-time business network that brings unprecedented resiliency, efficiency, and shared business benefits for the entire network of restaurants and food service companies and their rich ecosystem of suppliers, distributors, and logistics providers.

“For the Restaurant & Food Service industry, driving forecast accuracy from sixty or seventy percent into the nineties is a big deal, and our platform makes it possible,” said Greg Brady, CEO of One Network Enterprises. “One Network runs the whole process autonomously with the aid of its AI-enabled NEO agents. This means that restaurants can dramatically improve service levels and deliver the freshest product for the best possible customer experience – while at the same time cutting inventories in half, reducing waste, and lowering supply chain expenses, like the huge cost of expediting. Plus, there’s a real revenue bounce as stockouts disappear. It’s a recipe for success – and a true competitive advantage.”

For an industry with a highly complex and decentralized supply chain, One Network supports enterprises at every point along the maturity path toward autonomous supply chain management — from control tower visibility, collaboration, and analysis to short-term exception management around orders & shipments to longer term contract management and finally up through planning & inventory optimization with the most advanced technologies.

The most important new functionality is NEO, One Network’s proprietary intelligent agent technology, that makes autonomous supply chain management possible for each location and its trading network. For example, a leading global restaurant enterprise with over 1,000 restaurants in two dozen countries significantly improved location-level and supplier forecasts and order accuracy, especially during Limited Time Offerings (LTOs). The perpetual inventory capability, powered by NEO, automatically keeps count of stock on-hand for all current products and raw materials. This is vital for computing replenishment needs, so that inventory levels across millions of product-restaurant combinations can be monitored, refined, and replenished.

The One Network Restaurant & Food Service solution uses restaurant-level Point of Sale (POS) data or cafeteria location-specific consumption data augmented by planned forecasts to drive daily replenishment to locations and real-time order forecast updates to the whole network. As a result, the network benefits are:

• Improved forecast accuracy up to 95%
• Increased revenue due to reduced stockouts and higher fulfillment rates
• Reduced supplier expediting costs by 75-90%
• Reduced restaurant inventories by 50-70%
• Reduced waste by 0.4%-0.9%
• Decreased COGS (cost of goods sold) by 0.5%-1%
• Improved forecast accuracy to suppliers by 80%
• Reduced manual planning and execution effort by 50% or more

Restaurant & Food Service companies across segments, including Fine Dining, Fast-Casual, Casual, and Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), can benefit from a range of new capabilities that improve inventory planning accuracy and responsiveness including:

• Forecasting Based on Restaurant Foot Traffic enables restaurant operators & planners to model product demand despite gaps in other quantitative information like sales, orders or shipment history.
• Chain-of-Custody Tracking across the supply chain provides product ownership tracking to allow the management of disputes, enhances product track and trace, enables targeted recalls in a faster, simpler, and more precise manner, and supports full cold chain support with temperature control.
• Internet of Things (IoT) Capabilities provide a new stream processing framework so the restaurant’s network is better positioned to handle high volume events, GPS information, and data from temperature sensors.
• High-Fidelity What-if Scenario Capabilities allow managers to evaluate complex scenarios to study the effect of a proposed change before it is implemented. This could be as simple as changing an order policy type for a particular supply node, or as complex as changing several parameters, like demand variability and supply variability, to observe the effect on stock levels.