Topic related to Mcdonald

McDonald is the largest fast food restaurant brand in the world. It provides a mass fast food service with great-tasting and high quality foods as well as speed and convenience to customers. (McDonald annual report 2013) It operates with a low variety and high volume products. Technology is used to improve operation process in order to produce standardized service to individual customer. Thus only limited customization of service, and limited contact between customers and staffs can be made. (Greasley, 2013)
In the late 1980, McDonald began to change due to the new challenging. For external, high competition of competitors, new regulation of continuous increase in labour cost, unpredictable customer demand, increase in social responsibility needs, and changes in climate lead to the needs of energy efficient equipment and management of energy use. (McDonald annual report 2013) For internal, McDonald adopted a make-to-stock strategy in order to provide speedy service to customers. According to Greasley (2013), a make-to-stock strategy can shorten the throughput time the customer from ordering to receive the product or service. As you can see in figure 1, McDonald operated the kitchen with a line layout in which the hamburger assembly process start from one end, then move in a flow from one processing station to the next. The process will go through four steps which toasting the buns, adding condiments and hot meat patty, wrapping andstorage in the metal warming pad at last. (Francis) After taking the order at the counter, employee will take the assembled bun, chips and drinks to the customer within 1 minute. McDonald has adopted this method for over 40 years. The management of McDonald found that unpredictable customer needs causing stock out, it can increase in the customers waiting time, and decease the service level. Wrong forecasting caused overstock, a large amount of obsolete and wastes of foods generated every day. Buns cannot storage overnight as McDonald