Restaurants & Catering Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Restaurants & Catering market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Business Travel Accommodation market. Travel managers have begun to understand the implications of their colleagues' personal data being handled by a third-party provider, more so after several high-level data breaches. While it is still not possible to completely avoid the data sharing, buyers are more diligent in inserting elaborate data security and confidentiality clauses in their contracts. These developments increase the risks and compliance requirements, which in turn adds to the cost of services.

With regional and national boundaries blurring in today's corporate world, companies increasingly find themselves with a latent need to bring together geographically distant teams, customers and stakeholders. Therefore, the demand outlook for Restaurants & Catering is expected to remain strong.

To simplify the corporate travel and events process and enhance the end-to-end experience of users, suppliers are innovating with tools that aggregate the multiple fragments of this process such as booking, management of disruptions, customer service and spend within a single interface.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Restaurants & Catering procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Restaurants & Catering. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers should seek collaboration with suppliers to identify demand patterns within the organization. This includes data sets for the time of booking, duration, and preference for time and days. Using such analysis, buyers can build a comprehensive corporate guideline and ensure that a specific set of service providers are used for services. Moreover, these data sets can be used to identify cost-saving opportunities.

It is important for category managers to track and measure the performance of suppliers against a set of defined KPIs that are agreed upon during the contract negotiation phase. The performance of suppliers can also be linked to a portion of their fee that can be paid upon rendering of services in a satisfactory manner. For instance, category buyers should assess supplier performance for adherence to allocated travel budgets.

Engage with suppliers that use technologies, such as SMMPs and holograms, to enable buyers to track expenditure and save on travel costs. This will significantly reduce overheads for buyers.

Restaurants & Catering procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Restaurants & Catering procurement. Some examples include: