Catch the margin drift before the P&L does.
COGS rarely blows up — it creeps. The COGS Control Center watches every location, every cost head, every item continuously, and Iris says something the moment a number starts to move.
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Resolution
Per item, per shift, per branch
Drift happens at the SKU and the shift — so that's where it's watched, not once a month in a network-level total.
Timing
Weeks earlier
Flagged the shift it crosses its threshold — not three to six weeks later when the monthly P&L finally lands.
Focus
Three SKUs, not forty
Variance is traced back to the handful of items actually driving it, so nobody audits the whole menu to find them.
COGS rarely blows up all at once. It creeps.
A scoop that's slightly generous. A topping applied a little heavier than spec. A supplier substitution made once during a shortage that quietly became the new normal. None of it looks like a problem on any single ticket — it only becomes visible weeks later, when the monthly P&L lands and someone asks why margin is down two points and nobody can say exactly when it started.
That gap — between when a cost problem begins and when someone notices — is the most expensive gap in F&B operations. The COGS Control Center is built to close it, and this walkthrough shows how, screen by screen.
The walkthroughOne workbench, network to final call
The tour moves from the widest view down to a single decision — each screen narrowing the question until there's something specific to do.
What the video walks through01 Network overview → 02 Cost heads → 03 Item groups → 04 Alerts → 05 Forecast → 06 The final call
Start with every branch on one screen; end with a specific item, at a specific location, and the action to take on it.
The network overview ranks locations by where cost is running hot. Cost heads and item groups break that down until the variance points at real SKUs. Alerts surface what has already crossed a threshold, forecast shows where the trend is heading if nothing changes, and the final call is where a manager decides — with the evidence already assembled.
The intelligenceWhere the intelligence actually lives
The workbench looks like dashboards. Underneath, three layers do the work — deterministic where it must be, predictive where it pays, and conversational where a human needs an answer, not another report.
Layer 1 · deterministic Zen Rules
COGS threshold monitoring lives here, not in a monthly forecast. A rule watches actual cost per item against its expected spec, shift by shift, and flags the moment a location or item crosses the line — not the month after.
Layer 2 · predictive Zen Models
Forecast and learn: where cost is heading if the current trend holds, which items are drifting together, and which movements are real signal versus normal day-to-day variance — so alerts are worth acting on, not noise.
Layer 3 · conversational Ask Iris
Turns "why is margin down?" into an answer. "Which items moved COGS this week, and where?" comes back with the SKUs, the branches, and the likely cause — instead of forty items to audit by hand.
By the time a number is wrong enough to show up in a monthly report, it's usually been wrong for three to six weeks — and every one of those weeks compounds the loss. Which is why the watching happens shift by shift, not in arrears
The final callFrom alert to action
Smaller than a price hikeThe instinct when COGS drifts is a price increase across the board. Most of the time that's the wrong tool. If the cause is portion drift on three items, the fix is a portion re-spec on those three items — a station guide, a scale check, a quick retrain — paired with a targeted price adjustment only where it's warranted. The Control Center points at the real cause, so the fix is almost always smaller and less disruptive than operators expect.
COGS drift isn't usually a pricing problem or a supplier problem. It's a visibility problem — the gap between when something starts and when someone's looking closely enough to see it. Close that gap, and the number stops being a monthly surprise.
See the COGS Control Center on your own network. Book a demo
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