The McMobile hopes to make fast food faster

McDonald's is hoping to speed up fast food by equipping staff at its 1,250 UK restaurants with queue-busting handheld devices.

Staff will take customer orders as they wait, making for a happier Happy Meal.

According to Steve Tiley, head of management information systems at McDonald's UK, the devices will be in place at all restaurants by the end of the year.

'This will cut queues so, by the time we've taken the order and the customer gets to the till, the food should be waiting and they just have to pay,' Tiley told Computing.

Food orders will travel over segregated wireless networks to be processed.

The decision to adopt mobile devices in the restaurants follows their successful use at the company's Drive Thru establishments.

The devices are being provided by handheld specialist Symbol.

As well as processing food orders, the devices will run business intelligence software from Business Objects. The software has been running on the company's thin client and intranet infrastructure since 2001, and has allowed it to make significant savings.

'We spent about 12 per cent of our annual IT budget that year and achieved a return on investment within nine months,' Tiley said.

McDonald's gathers reams of information each day such as sales information and marketing data on its Oracle database and uses Business Objects to analyse it over night.

Local supervisors are sent the information by eight o'clock each morning, allowing any areas that need attention to be highlighted and subsequently addressed.

As well as providing management with a clear understanding of how each individual restaurant is performing, the company has virtually eliminated its administration processes, cutting 500 hours of processes.

'The reduction in man time has been a massive saving,' Tiley said. 'Restaurants can actively see how they are performing, which would not have previously been possible.'

McDonald's is also set to use Business Objects to introduce a scorecard-based system so managers can keep an eye on key performance indicators to ensure they are operating as best they can.

Tiley says the technology has had a positive impact on the customer service, with 500 restaurants receiving no complaints at all over a two-month period.