McDonald's signs five-year IT support deal with Fujitsu

McDonald's has signed a five-year deal with Fujitsu for the provision of IT infrastructure support services to its 1,200 UK restaurants.

McDonald's is consolidating work previously undertaken by many different suppliers under a single contract with Fujitsu. It hopes that this will simplify the company's support model and give a better overview of its IT estate.

Fujitsu will support the entire IT infrastructure including tills and point-of-sale technology, as well as drive through ordering, technology in the kitchens themselves, and back-office IT.

McDonald's is made up of both its own restaurants and franchisees, a complicated structure that has led to its IT becoming fragmented in the past.

Fujitsu is tasked with simplifying the infrastructure, reducing and preventing calls to the IT team, reducing onsite engineering visits, and meeting SLAs set according to problem severity, with fixes required within four or eight hours, or the next day. Fujitsu must also provide a reduction in the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure.

An element of Fujitsu's role will be to bring a "user exchangeable parts" strategy to its support, enabling restaurant staff to fix minor problems themselves without having to call an engineer.

Commenting on the work, Jon Wolfe, business unit director at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, said: "Our work for Macdonald's must reflect the pace at which the business operates – the most critical part being to keep tills open and operating.

"The role will evolve to support new technologies such as touch-screen ordering and contactless payments – both areas that McDonald's is already deploying."