Year 4 Consulting Project
For our fourth year consulting project we worked with a retail cake and cupcake bakery in Guelph, Ontario. A big issue for them was overall business and inventory management. We realized that they were doing a lot of their business manually and could have definitely benefited from an automated management and inventory system, including some other added factors that could help increase business efficiency. The owner wasn’t big on automated systems because of the changing bakery environment, however we wanted to present her with the benefits of both an automated and manual system and then it would be up to her whether she considers our recommendation. She also wanted us to conduct social media research and systems that could help her manage the bakery social media accounts as she was busy working the front store as well as managing the back business.
After researching different bakery systems, using a scoring weighted model my group chose to go with Baking It, a cloud based bakery management system for at home or small baking businesses. Baking It is a virtually simple management system, however after completing the 14 day trial its biggest downfall was the time it took to enter recipe and inventory information. So in our reccomendation we argued that although in the begining she wold have to take some time to input data from her already collected manul system, the Baking It system would be better in the long run. However, we did create a manual inventory management system for her using excel for which she was really excited about.
I also conducted quick research for her social media presence and although she already has Facebook and Instagram, I wanted her to open a Pinterest account because of the benefit and website foot traffic she would generate from her cupcake Pinterest posts and site links. In order to manage her time, in particular lack of I suggested she use a social media management tool like Hootsuite because of its content calendar and ability to schedule posts ahead of time.
