Driving McDonald's innovation

McDonald’s is one of the world’s most innovative companies

Anyone across Australia & New Zealand within its 14 functional departments can submit a business case for change.

But driving innovation in a business of McDonald’s scale and complexity needs a cohesive decision-making process that considers all the angles.

As a household brand and one of the largest employers across Australia & New Zealand, decisions impact hundreds of thousands of employees, suppliers, and customers.

Our brief was to work with McDonald’s to digitise and streamline their business case briefing and approval process, powered by monday.com.

What we delivered

• Increased communication and operational efficiency across all stakeholders
• A standardised, modernised internal system to replace disparate manual processes
• Delight for project managers who supported individuals in bringing their ideas to life
• Delight for end customers through approved ideas like:
  • Potato scallops with chicken salt
  • Cheesy Jalapeno Pops
  • Cajun Chicken Deluxe burger
  • And many more new concepts

Our solution in numbers

• 500+ business cases submitted annually
• $680,376 annual value in efficiencies
• 1,224 hours saved per month in the business case briefing process
• 20,075 unnecessary emails not sent per month
• POC delivered inside 30 days
• 87.8% of users agree the solution improves collaboration

The solution was showcased to McDonald’s global operations team as an example of best practice.

We were also delighted to win the award for Platform Innovator at the 2023 CRN Impact Awards for this project.

Who is McDonald’s? (Just kidding.)

McDonald’s is the second largest private employer in the world.

That means every business decision has wide-reaching consequences.

Getting those decisions wrong, or not consulting the right people, can have multi-million dollar business impacts.

So McDonald’s Australia uses a rigorous 12-step business case approval process, called business briefs internally, to help get more decisions right more often.

Problem was, each team followed this process differently:

• No single source of truth to track progress of all the business briefs
• Teams consulted different people, collating feedback manually via email
• Used different templates in Excel and Word, creating manual work and double-handling
• Worked to different timelines, often resulting in bottlenecks

The process impacts 12 internal business departments.

In most business cases, external stakeholders were also impacted.

One person was responsible for ensuring all ideas were captured and submitted for relevant approvals.

They sifted through the different versions of documents and spreadsheets to compile a standard brief for senior executives.

They also worked with the person championing the idea, called the Brief Lead internally, to ensure all the required information was included.

What was the brief?

• Create a uniform process for functional departments to prepare business cases for senior leaders
• Make it easy for all departments to have visibility on business case status
• Give transparency on rationale of approvals and rejections
• Build a single source of truth for all stakeholders so everyone is on the same page

What were the challenges?

• Adapting technology to suit existing processes and reporting
• Ensuring all stakeholder requirements were met
• Change fatigue from implementing too much change rapidly
• Business continuity

What were the risks?

• Major time bottleneck
• Human error and omission of key information
• Single point of failure
• Legwork to communicate decisions up and down the chain
• No audit trail
• Limited ability to collaborate

Innovation

We built a custom solution using monday.com as the core platform that collates underlying data from Brief Leads and Project Managers.

This data includes:

• Internal feedback and recommendations
• Downstream actions and next steps at each stage of the approval process
• New actions and decisions arising
• Supporting material like cost-benefit analysis, pricing models, and other technical details

Data is automatically populated into a templated PDF which is familiar and user-friendly for senior executives, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

The solution is powered by monday.com, Make, and PandaDoc.

The tools

monday.com is a cloud-based project management tool that helps teams manage tasks, projects, and workflows.

Make, formerly known as Integromat, is a middleware tool that uses API integrations and webhooks to connect various applications and automate workflows.

PandaDoc is a document automation software that streamlines document creation, delivery, and tracking processes.

Our solution takes and organises data from monday.com into McDonald’s standardised briefing template using these three platforms.

Why do McDonald’s love our solution?

“Implementing monday.com has significantly enhanced collaboration and communication among our team, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.”

Daniel Antonjuk – Integration Consultant & Digital Champion ANZ, Supply Chain

“monday.com has improved our business process efficiency and productivity in 4 areas: streamlining communication, transparency, automation and increased accountability.”

Matt Carey – National Operations Consultant, Business Process

Here’s the proof our solution works

The McDonald’s team prepare an average of 520 business cases each year.

The single source of truth makes communication more efficient.

Previously, each brief required an average of 38 emails per brief.

Users now collaborate and collate information directly within monday.com. This saves over 20,075 unnecessary emails each year.

Across 102 users, our solution saves an estimated 3 hours per week to prepare, communicate, and assess business cases.

That’s 1,224 hours per month.

87.8% of McDonald’s users surveyed post-solution rollout agreed that monday.com improves cross-business collaboration.

Related work

Work Perfect helps QSR clients optimise monday.com for key operations. We build solutions for franchise management, centralising communication and ensuring brand consistency.

For property and real estate, they configure monday.com to track leases and manage facilities and construction projects efficiently.

Additionally, Work Perfect implements asset registers and risk management frameworks, helping QSRs track equipment and mitigate potential issues for enhanced resilience.

Other clients we’ve worked with: