Many companies have inventory in which they must manage in order to supply the
demand of the consumer or customer. Our project is based on the research of Inventory
management and how it is applied or used in the Cracker Barrel Restaurant. In this project,
we have elected to explain and determine how the company develops its inventory plans to
support the products or services they provide to the consumer. On our field research we
asked a series of questions to one of Cracker Barrels Associate Managers Tom Kelly trying
to get a general idea of how or what methods they use to manage the company inventory.
There are many functions that can accommodate the functions of inventory, Cracker Barrel
Restaurant maintains four types of inventories: they have the raw material inventory,
work-in-process inventory, maintenance/repair/ operating supply inventory, and finished
good inventory. The raw materials is the uncooked food in which they order, the work in
process inventory is when they are preparing the food, the maintenance/repair/ operating
supply inventory is the chemicals they use to clean the dishes and the grill, and the finished
good inventory is the food that is cooked and served. Being that all of these things are
inventory they must be managed, used, and monitored in order to keep inventory straight
and to minimize cost. Cracker Barrel has many methods of managing the inventory in
which they reorder if it is raw materials or other materials. The methods that are used to
manage raw materials are the method of rotating the raw materials in a certain order like
from oldest to newest that will allow them to use the oldest inventory first and the newest
last. They also use a method which they portion the inventory to only serve a certain
amount for example, they portion out the amount of fries that they serve in one serving the
fries have to weight a certain amount in order to be serve with the meal. The method used
to manage work-in-process is they have to cook a certain amount of food a day, but they
can not over cook that amount in which they management team puts on their cook sheet.
The cook sheet is a sheet that tells the cooks the number of pans of corn to cook for that
shift they are working or number peas to cook for that night. Sometimes the cook sheet has
the right amount on there to cook but sometimes they have to end up cooking more than
