Turning Uncertainty into an Advantage: How Strong Partnerships, Data, and Leadership Strengthen Hospitality Supply Chains

Ryan Laker, Procurement Manager, Dewey’s Pizza

Ryan Laker serves as Procurement Manager at Dewey’s Pizza, where he oversees sourcing and purchasing of products and services in alignment with the company’s vision and financial objectives. His core responsibilities include managing supplier relationships, negotiating pricing, overseeing purchasing systems such as Restaurant 365, and delivering data-driven insights to leadership to enhance cost control and operational excellence.

This article is based on an interview conducted by Hospitality Business Review with Ryan Laker. The conversation explores how Ryan and Dewey’s Pizza work to insulate themselves from market volatility by leveraging data, building trust, and purpose driven leadership.

Stability in an Era of Demand and Supply Uncertainty

The hospitality industry has long operated under pressure, with volatile demand, tight margins, and high guest expectations. With evolving supply chains facing strain from demand volatility, transportation bottlenecks, labor shortages, and broader economic headwinds, disruption is a daily reality.

In this environment, top-performing organizations don’t just react quickly—they build resilience by design. Across the industry, stable supply chains are driven by three factors: strong vendor partnerships, disciplined use of data and forecasting, and procurement leaders who connect strategy with operations.

Vendor Partnerships as a Stabilizing Force

Strong vendor partnerships are one of the most powerful stabilizers in a disrupted supply chain. Transactional relationships focused narrowly on price and contract terms may deliver short-term savings, but they rarely provide the flexibility and transparency required during periods of volatility. Partnerships grounded in shared purpose create trust. That trust enables faster information sharing, honest risk disclosure, and a willingness to prioritize mutual success over short-term gains.

In practical terms, strong partnerships increase agility. Joint decision-making becomes faster because communication channels are already open. Resilience improves through shared contingency planning and proactive risk mitigation. Most importantly, continuity is preserved. In hospitality, where supply interruptions can immediately impact guest satisfaction and revenue, continuity can be the difference between a manageable challenge and a structural weakness.

Being a strong partner, however, requires more than setting expectations, enforcing accountability, and paying invoices on time. Those are fundamentals. The more strategic question is: How can we make our vendors better by partnering with us?

Uncertainty in hospitality is inevitable. The competitive advantage lies in designing organizations that can absorb and adapt to it.

The answer begins with listening and seeking to understand a supplier’s operational challenges, cost pressures, and growth goals. Through candid conversations, we can identify small adjustments refining ordering cadence, clarifying forecasting assumptions, standardizing specifications can significantly reduce supplier pain points while preserving operational performance.

Partnerships transform vendors from external service providers into extensions of the operational team.

Using Data and Forecasting to Drive Smarter Decisions

While partnerships provide stability, data provides clarity. Effective purchasing and inventory decisions depend on managing a complex ecosystem of internal and external data sources: historical consumption patterns, seasonal trends, supplier lead times, pricing fluctuations, and macroeconomic indicators.

Data collection is just the start of the process. Raw data must then be scrubbed, validated, and standardized to ensure accuracy and consistency. Once validated, semantic models organize and present the information in ways that answer the most critical business questions: What should we buy? When should we buy it? And at what level of risk?

The greatest challenge is not data volume, it is change management. Supply chain systems are living ecosystems. Data sources evolve, business assumptions shift, and analytical logic is refined over time. Understanding how those changes ripple downstream and impact reporting accuracy is both technically complex and operationally critical. Ultimately, the goal is trusted data. When teams believe in the data, they make confident purchasing and inventory decisions. Trust, however, is not automatic. It is built gradually and can be lost quickly.

Procurement plays a critical role in creating that trust. Procurement professionals engage with the data daily and understand its nuances. They can identify anomalies, unexpected cost spikes, incorrect units of measure, inconsistent supplier coding that may otherwise go unnoticed.

By partnering with data and analytics teams during validation and modeling, procurement adds context that accelerates accuracy. When issues arise downstream, procurement can also support triage efforts, helping translate operational realities for data teams and clarifying analytical findings for frontline users.

Beyond troubleshooting, procurement serves as a steward of supply chain data. By supporting adoption, encouraging feedback, and continuously refining inputs, procurement leaders strengthen both system integrity and organizational confidence. The outcome is not just better reporting, but smarter buying.

Procurement Leadership at the Intersection of Strategy and Operations

Strong partnerships and trusted data are only as effective as the leadership guiding them. Procurement leaders sit at a unique intersection between corporate strategy and operational execution. Their effectiveness depends on their ability to translate high-level objectives into practical, frontline solutions.

Alignment begins with shared purpose. Procurement and operations must work toward the same outcomes: guest satisfaction, operational continuity, and long-term value creation. Misalignment can turn cost-saving initiatives into service compromises and weaken operational excellence.

Equally important is empathy for operational realities. Successful procurement leaders understand constraints at every level from hourly associates managing inventory to general managers balancing budgets. This perspective enables them to design solutions that are efficient and practical, not theoretical.

Modern procurement leadership also requires problem-solving capability. Rather than functioning solely as negotiators, leaders must navigate complex Problem-Impact-Resolution scenarios. This approach identifies root causes, evaluates downstream implications, and preserves trust across stakeholders. It demands clear communication, disciplined judgment, and the ability to manage healthy tension between competing priorities.

At its core, procurement leadership in hospitality is about judgment. Every decision requires balancing quality, deliverability, and price on a case-by-case basis. Achieving that balance consistently requires flexibility, collaboration, and a deep understanding of how supply chain decisions ultimately affect guests and frontline teams.

From Uncertainty to Advantage

Uncertainty in hospitality is inevitable. The competitive advantage lies not in eliminating disruption, but in designing organizations capable of absorbing and adapting to it.

Strong vendor partnerships provide stability and agility. Disciplined data management enables clarity and confidence. Effective procurement leadership ensures alignment between strategic intent and operational reality.

Together, these elements transform supply chain uncertainty from a persistent threat into a manageable and even strategic advantage.