The Burger Industry Takes a Big Helping of Technology
By ERIC A. TAUB -- October 8, 1998
Ah, the joys of youth. What baby boomer can't
remember the drive with a date to the local Big
Boy, A
& W or Dairy Queen, where a young woman cheerfully took
orders from people in parked cars, then delivered
shakes and cheeseburgers she might have even helped to
prepare?
Forget it. In the fast-food
industry today, there's no room
for individual expression,
carefree service or pitching in
to help when the going gets
tough. The next time you chow
down on one of the 1,024
permutations of a Burger King
Whopper (the customer can
make up to 10 choices per
burger, like whether to have
cheese or pickles), you might like to reflect on the
fact that burger production has become an exact science
in which everything is regimented, every distance
calculated and every dollop of ketchup monitored and
tracked.
“Each of our company-owned restaurants is a
sophisticated network,” said Patrick Forney, who
oversees the sales-tracking systems at the Burger King
Corporation's headquarters in Miami. Special software
is used to monitor every aspect of the ordering and
serving process in real time. That information is
garnered from every counter sales terminal and then
sent via a local network to a Windows NT server in the
restaurant manager's office. Every major fast-food
chain, including McDonald's, Hardee's, Kentucky Fried
Chicken, Taco Bell and Wendy's, uses a version of the
same software package in at least some of their stores,
according to the company that makes the software,
Compris Technologies. (Citing competitive pressure,
McDonald's officials declined to be interviewed for
this article.)
Burger King's process begins the moment you're ready to
buy. The counter person takes your order and types it
into the terminal, including such special requests as
extra pickles, no mustard or three slices of tomato.
Each item that makes up that order is then
automatically deleted from inventory.
A list of the items ordered is sent to the appropriate
preparation station. Burger orders appear on a video
screen near the grill, while the “expedite person” gets
a printout showing the number of fries, desserts and
shakes.
The order taker does not need to know the price of an
item because it automatically appears when the button
for that item is touched.
If the chain is running a special, like half-price
children's meals, then Burger King headquarters sends a
command directly to the computers at every one of its
company-owned stores to alter the menu for the period
the special is being offered. Each terminal
automatically reverts to the old price when the special
offer expires.
To accomplish all that, the manager of each Burger King
uses an off-the-shelf Windows NT server to transmit and
receive data to and from the terminals at the sales
counter and to store data. It runs a modified version
of the restaurant software, called Composer, to track
food consumption, the time needed to fill an order, the
time needed to give change, how long it takes for an
order to be entered and standard bookkeeping data on
employees, like payroll and overtime information.
“With Composer, you can figure out how much of an item
is going to be ordered during every upcoming 15-minute
period, even distinguishing between days of the week,
by averaging sales over the past nine weeks,” said Paul
Eurek, president of Compris, in Kennesaw, Ga. The
company supplies inventory, sales and labor tracking
software to more than half of the restaurants in the
nation's top 100 chains.
The software monitors the use of condiments like
ketchup down to units of 0.12 ounces and calculates
when it's time to order more food. For example, the
number of tomatoes used in a day is calculated by
dividing the number of slices served by the typical
number of slices per tomato; the total number of tomato
slices served is automatically kept up to date each
time an item is entered into a computer at the counter.
By matching the amount of food ordered with the amount
of money taken in, and accounting for spoilage,
managers can quickly determine if any food or money is
missing.
Combinations, condiments can be ordered in many
different ways — extra mustard, extra mayo, no pickles
— and the system tracks each one.
With Composer, usage patterns can be tracked for as
long as the software has been in place. If a store
manager notices that sales of fries jump up 20 percent
on every Super Bowl Sunday, the manager can stock extra
potatoes before the next game. If sales always increase
during a national promotion, the manager can instruct
the program to increase the predicted food usage by a
certain percentage for each day during the promotion.
Sales, usage and inventory data can be viewed as graphs
or pie charts, and the information can be exported to
standard spreadsheets like Microsoft's Excel for
further massaging.
Each evening, that day's sales data are uploaded from
the store's server to the company's headquarters. The
main office can also tap into a local company-owned
store's computer at any time to see what's going on.
Headquarters can even take over a counter terminal if
something's going wrong.
All that helps fiercely competitive fast-food
franchises make sure that food costs, as well as the
food itself, are cut to the bone.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company |
