McDonald’s Operational Strategy

Overview

McDonald’s is the chief global foodservice retailer with more than 30,000 local restaurants serving nearly 50 million people in over 119 countries each day. The example that we used as a guide is restaurant; the scope of business is fast food.

The first McDonald’s was opened in May 15th, 1940 by two brothers Richard & Maurice McDonald. The restaurant first sold - barbeque ribs, beef and pork sandwiches. After a survey was done the brothers realized that 80% of their sales were hamburgers. As a result, in October 1948 the brothers closed their original McDonald’s business to make changes to the restaurant’s business concepts. They also realized that the future relied on speed, mass production and lower prices. In December 1948, they opened the original McDonald’s restaurant offering "SPEEDEE SERVICE SYSTEM" selling 15 cent hamburgers and 10 cent fries. In 1954, Ray Kroc a milkshake machine salesman visited the McDonalds brothers and convinced them to let him purchase the rights to franchise McDonald's. After Kroc discovered the secret of their high-volume burger-and-shake operation, he eventually bought the rights of McDonald’s in 1961, for 2.7 million with the goal to make cheap ready-to-go hamburgers, french fries and milkshakes. McDonald’s is now the largest fast food chain in the world and the brand is mostly associated with the term “fast food”. Today competitions are Burger King and Wendy’s.

Capacity

The process flow customers need when visiting a McDonald’s restaurant is getting their food done right at a fast and quick time. McDonald’s limit to serve a customer is four (4) minutes. But, sometimes those four minutes turn out to be more because of some number of reasons for example customer not happy with cold fries, or with the way their sandwich is made. Another example is short staff because the Manager did not predict that they would have a rush and there are not enough cooks or cashiers.

McDonald’s bottleneck would be running out of buns, fries and hamburgers due to someone not ordering enough of these items. Another bottleneck for McDonald’s could be having sales on hamburgers and run out of burger or even bun.

Some of the steps my team would address about bottlenecks are:

• Making sure that there are sufficient buns, fries and hamburgers etc. in stock for each shift

• If there is a hamburger sale there is enough in stock

• Also making sure that in the process of a burger sale we do not overstock but stock wisely

• And most importantly the inventory is check at the end of each shift because some days may be busier than others

Location

The areas we think need some improvement are:

a. The