Birchstreet × POS.
Turning a one-way data pull into a two-way live integration — so what's ordered, what's sold, and what's on the shelf finally told the same story.
At Compass Group's CORE Solutions division, I helped direct a bidirectional integration between Birchstreet, our procurement platform and the point-of-sale system used across our venues. What had been a one-way inventory pull became a live, two-way loop where every sale automatically decremented ingredient-level inventory, closing the gap between ordered, sold, and on-hand for the first time.
Onboarded
Flow
Reconciliation
Decrementing
Before: data flowed from Birchstreet to the POS, with reconciliation happening manually. After: the systems talk both directions, and every sale automatically decrements ingredient-level inventory.
Closing the loop between what's ordered and what's sold.
Three phases from problem to production integration.
Compass Group runs procurement through Birchstreet — the platform where operators order inventory, track item catalogs, and manage supplier relationships. Point-of-sale systems, meanwhile, live at the venue level, capturing every transaction as it happens.
The two systems had a connection, but it was one-directional. Birchstreet could push item and inventory data into the POS, but nothing flowed the other way. The POS knew what was being sold in real time. Birchstreet had no idea.
The result was a data gap operators had to close manually. If a venue sold 200 hot dogs on a Saturday, someone had to manually reconcile the count against Birchstreet inventory later — sometimes days later, sometimes not at all. Inventory numbers drifted. Reorder decisions were made against stale data. Waste and stockouts both increased.
I helped direct the design and rollout of a bidirectional integration that closed the loop — Birchstreet and the POS now speak to each other in both directions, live.
The key innovation was recipe-level decrementing. Every menu item is mapped to its ingredients through Birchstreet's recipe catalog. When a POS transaction fires, the system automatically breaks the sold item down into its recipe components and decrements each one against Birchstreet inventory.
My role was on the direction side: aligning stakeholders across Birchstreet, the POS vendor, our internal IT team, and venue operators. Making the case for why bidirectional was worth the complexity, defining the recipe-mapping rules, and driving the timeline to rollout.
The integration rolled out across 100+ venues that were part of the broader Birchstreet onboarding effort. The moment it went live at a location, the manual reconciliation step simply disappeared from operators' workflows.
Real-time inventory accuracy was the immediate win. Operators could pull a Birchstreet report at any point in the day and see accurate on-hand counts — not last night's guess. Reorder decisions were made against live data. Waste tracking became actual tracking instead of educated estimation.
Downstream, the accuracy compounded. Forecasting improved because the data feeding forecasts was clean. Menu-engineering conversations could reference real ingredient consumption instead of assumed usage. The integration set the pattern for how Compass could think about system connectivity going forward — live, bidirectional, recipe-aware — instead of settling for the one-way batch loads that had been the norm.
Live data replaced late reconciliation.
- Real-time inventory accuracy across 100+ venues, no more manual reconciliation between POS sales and Birchstreet counts.
- Recipe-level decrementing, every sale automatically reduced ingredient inventory to the component level.
- Cleaner reorder decisions because on-hand counts reflected reality instead of yesterday's estimate.
- Better forecasting and waste tracking because the data feeding both was finally accurate.
- Set the pattern for bidirectional system connectivity across Compass Group, Levy Division.
The best integrations don't just move data. They eliminate the manual step that only existed because the systems didn't talk to each other.