McDonald's Corporation - McTracker

Wide Area Network Stock Tracking & Automated Ordering System

Whilst working at my local McDonald's restuarant as a floor manager as source of income during my time at college, one of my main responsibilities was to keep track of and order more stock.
At the end of each day, I had to read through a printout from each till, noting how much of each menu item was sold into a large ring-bound stockbook. Once done, I then had to manually deduct these numbers from the stock-level counts performed by other staff, to calculate how much was remaining, and then ring the regional office and order further stock if required.

This process was both time consuming and prone to human error. It was a common occurence for restuarants to run short of stock, especially during peek periods throughout the year such as Christmas and the summer holidays.

To counter this, I developed a small application that could communicate with the tills directly, via a service com port, and, using an access database containing data to tie up the till codes with the actual menu item names, automatically calculate how many of each menu item was sold. It would then print these results to a grid identical to those contained within the ring-bound stockbook. This meant that we could simply run this program at the end of each night and within seconds produce an acurate report we could simply slip into the stockbook at the revelent location.

After demonstrating the program to the owner of the store I worked for, he arranged a meeting with the regional managers so that I could demonstrate the product to them. The meeting was a success, and whilst I walked away with an agreed order for five copies of the product at a price of £100 per copy.

After six months, and with the program now in heavy use throughout the region, I planned and proposed a major improvement to the program; the ability for the program run every hour, recording statistical data such as the amount of sales, menu item sales figures, and popularity of the drive-thru (eg, how many customers used the drive-thru till during that hour). It would also keep this information locally within the store, but also transmit it over the companies WAN to the regional office, where it would be stored in an Access database and provide almost-realtime feedback on each restaurant - something McDonald's were very keen to achieve.
Again, the regional managers were impressed with the product and agreed a further order for the new product, at a price of £250.

The final improvement to the program that I developed was the ability for it to automatically order more stock whenever the restaurant's levels dropped below a certain, definable threshold.
A new "delivery entry" section was added to the program that allowed a staff member to easily enter the amount of each stock item that arrived with each delivery, as well as an automatic "order faxing" section that would, when triggered, send a fax order to the relevent supplier for a pre-determined amount of stock.

Once more, the regional managers were impressed with the product, but because by this time I was finishing College and looking to end my employment with McDonald's, I suggested that instead of purchasing the upgrade, they purchase the rights and the sourcecode for the product, allowing them to implement it in as many restaurants as they desire, as well as make any changes or improvements they desire, without my involvement.
It took a little longer than the previous two times to agree, but eventually I sold the rights to "McTracker" to McDonalds UK for £3,000.

As of 2003, the program was in use in over 300 McDonalds restaurants in the UK, and whilst it has undergone several changes, it is still the same product at the core.