McMobile hopes to make fast food faster

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

The orders will be entered into an intranet and sent to the kitchen over a wireless network.

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

"This will cut queues so that, 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," he told vnunet.com's sister title Computing.

The decision to use mobile devices in the restaurants follows their successful use at drive-through establishments.

As well as processing food orders, the devices, provided by handheld specialist Symbol, will run business intelligence software from Business Objects.

The software has been operating 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," said Tiley.

Every day McDonald's gathers reams of information, such as sales and marketing data, on an Oracle database and uses Business Objects to analyse it overnight.

Local supervisors are sent the information by 8am the next day, allowing any areas that need attention to be highlighted and addressed.