McDonald's is to implement a mobile inspection system
for its restaurants around the world following a successful
roll-out in the UK.
The fast-food chain will deploy its mobile Global Restaurant
Operation Improvement Process (Groip) application to at least 3,000
restaurant inspectors worldwide. McDonald's designed the business
processes for an application that could be deployed globally, and
then tested it in the UK.
The company equipped its 200 restaurant inspectors in the UK
with Pocket PCs in February this year. Staff were given two months
to familiarise themselves with the devices before the company
rolled out its Groip application in April, said McDonald's UK IS
business relationship manager Keith Frimley.
Since April, the 200 restaurant inspectors have used their
mobile devices to inspect the six to 20 restaurants that they are
each responsible for.
McDonald's has 1,290 restaurants in the UK, all of which are
inspected four times a year. Two of the inspections are announced
in advance and two are unannounced.
The devices are used to record the answers to more than 700
questions for an announced inspection and 300 questions for a
surprise inspection. Inspectors spend two to three days in the
restaurant for the longer inspections.
After seven months in use, Frimley said the technology was
saving each inspector more than two hours of effort in terms of
generating reports following a restaurant review.
McDonald's used the Afaria application from supplier iAnywhere
to create a standard "image" for the Groip interface for every
territory worldwide.
The image enables the restaurant inspectors to transmit data by
either GPRS or Wi-Fi to McDonald's head-office systems.
Each country can choose the device that its restaurant
inspectors will use to access the Groip application. In the UK, the
inspectors have been equipped with Qtek 9090s from HTC that run on
the O2 network.