Food Management

Serving B&I's After Hours Crowd: Take-in Takeout

Online ordering lets foodservice department manage onsite meal deliveries from local restaurants

January, 2004 - Like other big city financial and legal firms, Bear, Stearns & Company's corporate headquarters in New York City provides an evening meal for associates working overnight or overtime. Traditionally, employees in that situation would order out and periodically submit the charges on expense reports. But years of paperwork headaches and the difficulty of managing dinner spending convinced management at the investment banking and securities firm to seek an alternative after-hours dining solution.

Enter SeamlessWeb, an online meal and catering procurement service. Since switching overtime employees to SeamlessWeb just over a year ago, Bear Stearns has slashed its meal expense and administrative costs, says Bill Adams, associate director of office services. "It's a wonderful program," he beams.

Giving employees the freedom to order out late meals makes a lot of sense at Bear Stearns. Some 5,000 staffers keep the company's cafeteria humming until it closes at 5:00, but their ranks shrink to only about 200 after the end of the normal workday.

Taking up the slack are scores of nearby restaurants that are more than happy to deliver, and which can offer their takeout menus to Bear Stearns employees via the SeamlessWeb program.

About 100 establishments that are part of SeamlessWeb's network. To order, employees sign in to a website using their employee identification number and a special code, place their orders, and pick the meals up on the building's first floor. (Deliveries cannot be made to individual offices for security reasons.)

Adams says the company tries to limit dinner spending to $25, although there are some exceptions. The ordering system allows the company to cap spending and to make exceptions for specified reasons.

The program has solved the two major problems. "It lets us control how much employees spend on after-hours meals and to specify the hours when spending can occur, with all charges coming on a single invoice from the company," Adams says. He notes there are also "soft" savings since afterhours employees no longer spend time collecting receipts and completing expense reports. SeamlessWeb charges a small per-transaction fee that more than offsets the cost of processing 200 different T&E reports weekly that had formerly been incurred.

Centralizing and automating dinner charges also allows department managers to monitor spending more closely. Bear Stearns users can assign designated department and client charge codes to their orders, which simplifies accounting.

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