Big Data in the Burger Supply Chain

Big data, along with blockchain and robotics, is widely recognised to be one of three key innovations to impact supply chains over the next few years.

Major organisations are already using big data in their supply chain stock management, especially for consumer products, and perhaps most notably at the centre of the world’s most famous burger supplier – Mcdonald’s.

McDonald’s is a giant fast food retailer, serving over 60 million customers, from 34,000 restaurants around the globe, on a daily basis. Selling over 6.5 million burgers every day, they generate vast amounts of data, so what do they do with that data?

McDonald’s have become a data driven organisation, where analytics form a major part of their supply chain process, driven by their Big Data Roadmap. McDonald’s creates multi-disciplinary teams to discover, develop and implement new solutions across the organisation, especially in the big data and analytics area.

In the past, they managed data which was based on average metrics across stores, making it more difficult to fulfil specific local requirements. Using big data supplied from thousands of touch screen devices, including the self service kiosk’s introduced to many of their restaurants, they are provided with much more insight in to what is happening locally.

The company has visualised this information, using datasets, to better understand the cause and affect across multiple stores, which has enabled them them to make significant savings and to manage their global supply chains more effectively.

In addition to supply chain analytics, Mcdonald’s processes big data through predictive analytics to find the optimal solution for design, information and people practices. They analyse masses of variables to improve the company and the customer experience, tracking in-store traffic, customer interactions, drive-through flows, ordering patterns, point-of-sales data, video data and sensor data.

Information derived from this data is used in variations of their menus and even in the design of their restaurants – McDonald’s restaurants around the world do not look the same, each restaurant is slightly different as they are optimised using the data from the local market.

McDonald’s is a good example of using big data to create the best experience for their customers and to make their supply chain more effective and efficient, although they are not alone in doing so.

The Supply Chain Academy are embracing the movement towards innovations such as big data, blockchain and robotics, and are exploring the use of these techniques in a number of our upcoming events and courses. Follow the links below to discover two examples:

Thought Leadership Event – Leading in the Digital World – 21st June 2018

2 Day Course – Accelerate Innovation With Supply Chain Technology – 19th/20th September 2018

To find out more about the Supply Chain Academy, and how technology can help leverage your supply chain, please email info@supplychainacademy.org.uk or call 01708 259450.