Kyle Hauser has held many positions at Friendly’s Ice Cream LLC, the operator of the 339-unit Friendly’s restaurant chain and the manufacturer of ice cream products that are distributed to 8,000 retail outlets.
Hauser has been involved in Friendly’s real estate and accounting departments, as well as purchasing. Most recently, she was promoted from senior buyer to director of purchasing for the restaurants — purchasing for ice cream manufacture is done separately.
She discussed her strategies and priorities with Nation’s Restaurant News.
How do you plan to evolve Friendly’s purchasing activities?
Developing efficiencies in the supply chain and implementing a little bit of discipline. We’re an 80-year-old company, and we self-distribute — we have our own fleet of trucks.
That gives us some leeway with the number of SKUs we can carry, because it’s our own warehouse, but over the span of 80 years, maybe there are some SKUs that we shouldn’t be carrying. So I’m spending this year evaluating the cost of everything that we do, because any time someone touches something, that’s a cost. We’re evaluating the highest velocity and highest spend SKUs and [comparing that to] where we spend most of our time.
It’s not the most important SKUs, but the c-level stuff that proliferates, and it takes up a lot of time, because a buy is a buy. You have to research every purchase, whether it’s a pencil or hamburger. Is the time spent on the pencil as valuable as the time spent on the hamburger? Most times I’m going to go with “no.”
As purchasers, we have to go from being “getters” to being a first-class procurement department.
That’s an objective this year — to optimize our people, our suppliers and our guests, and spend our time on what really benefits those groups.
What do you need to do to optimize purchasing?
It’s implementing a process that will help us be more efficient — [determining] how an SKU enters our system, how it lives in our system and when it’s time for the SKU to have a funeral. That involves cooperation and collaboration from all the internal disciplines. Marketing, R&D and operations all have to be involved.
Discipline is really what we’re striving for here. But it doesn’t mean being inflexible. You have to have a plan and a goal, but if you find that a different situation from that plan is a valuable use of time, and it’s a collaborative decision, you’re going to turn off your path for that. But every day can’t be filled with 83 detours.
What kind of training is required for that?
We need our team members to be flexible enough to understand that things happen that are beyond your control, and to have a plan B.
Also, we can’t spend time rehashing [mistakes] or apportioning blame. We have a team that is committed to the idea of [asking] what’s the issue and how do we solve that problem.
What sorts of relationships are you building with your suppliers?
At the end of 2014, we pulled together a lot of the suppliers that we spend a lot of money with and asked them if there were places that they would recommend that we do things differently, and we’ve had some savings come out of that. So that’s time well spent.
You need to be mindful that a partnership is two-way, and to let your suppliers share their expertise.
Our suppliers have so much market information, and they’re more focused on their particular area, so we can learn from them. But that requires building a culture where there’s mutual trust. We all have an ulterior motive, and that’s to make money. If we pool our resources and make use of the information that suppliers have and we share our direction, we improve sales and everyone wins.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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