McDonald's Fast Food Restaurant JIT

McDonald's Fast Food Restaurant JIT

In the late 1980's after years of success, a changing marketplace brought new challenges to McDonald's. In response, McDonald's developed and implemented their new just-in-time kitchen system, called 'Made For You,' where every customer's sandwich is made to order. McDonald's new system has boosted employee morale and has become the ultimate just-in-time food preparation system. At McDonald's, strategy of just in time has been applied and bought many advantages to the organization and added value to the organization. this just in time system has helped in reducing the costs by cutting down inventory levels and wastage.Its looked expensive in the short term but reduced the wastage drastically and helped McDonald’s excel at customer satisfaction in the long term.

This is criteria for success :

-      Services

-      Quality

-      People

-      Food preparation

-      Profitability

A lot of advantages were brought in by this JIT method. The first is improved quality. the burgers are prepared freshly and hence the quality has improved. Second is customer services. As the burgers is made only after the order is placed, making special orders is not an issue.The third is cost reduction. Due to significant reduction in wastage as uncooked material has a higher shelf life. And last is reduction in waiting. Customer waiting time 11 minutes to just 1 minutes and half minutes.

Just-in-time systems utilize the pull method of materials flow. However, another popular method is the push method. To differentiate between these two systems, let's first consider the production system for a Quarter Pounder at a McDonald's restaurant. There are two workstations. The burger maker is the person responsible for producing this burger: Burger patties must be fried; buns must be toasted and then dressed with ketchup, pickles, mayonnaise lettuce, and cheese; and the patties must be inserted into buns and put on a tray. The final assembler takes the tray, wraps the burgers in paper, and restocks the inventory. Inventories must be kept low because any burgers left unsold after seven minutes must be destroyed.