McDonald

McDonald

Running fast food restaurants requires a very strong warehousing and very efficient logistics to ensure timely delivery of raw materials. Moreover, food industry requires very fresh raw materials to deliver quality. Thus, for McDonald to be a number one international fast foods restaurant, logistics management has to be very efficient. Currently, being the leading fast foods restaurant in the world while still providing quality products as well as services means management of logistics is very efficient. Without efficiency, such a huge chain of fast foods restaurants would not be efficient. To succeed in the fast foods industry it requires being in a position to provide advanced products timely that also requires planning effectively, which is only possible with access to reliable data on warehousing and logistics (thoughtcorp.com, 2011).

From the services offered by McDonald, it is evident that their warehousing is efficient. Without an efficient warehousing, it cannot be possible to provide a fast service as well as provide quality food to its customers. The organization stores its goods and materials in its warehouses and receives them from their distributors. The organization has one distributor in the areas it is located. The distributors are served with the responsibility of ensuring that all the materials needed such as liquid products, fresh products from farms such as lettuce among others are received by the restaurants from different parts of the region. The organization deals directly with products from farmers, which do not have to go through intermediaries ensuring that materials are fresh.

When materials are received, they are stored in the warehouses that produce and taken for production and packaging immediately they are needed. Fresh products that easily go bad are not stored for long. They are used as fast as possible to ensure they reach the consumers while still fresh. For efficiency, the materials are stored in rooms with different temperatures that range form ordinary room temperatures to frozen rooms. In addition, the organization uses spsecially-designed trucks for keeping temperatures at the right level depending on the need of each material stored during freight (mcdonaldsindia.com, n.d.).

McDonald has its stores conveniently stores in areas with connections to most of the places where materials are received. This enables the organization to have quick dispatches to the restaurants as needed. The company has one storage system in each region with different stores that dispatch products to various restaurants that require the items. McDonald has been quite efficient with this, considering that customers get fresh and fast deliveries and services as the restaurants specify or as a fast food should be. Thus, its convenient stores ensure that materials arrive at the restaurants at the right time. At the restaurants, they have their stores with most located in basements, where there are refrigerators and other facilities for storing what they receive from the main stores. This ensures fresh materials are available for the restaurants to use until they get more, while it remains fresh (Cheema, 2011).

The ability of McDonald to have timely deliveries of materials from the suppliers directly from farms to the restaurants ensures to reduce the time it takes for materials to reach the end user. It ensures to practice just-in-time logistics management, which is necessary for fast foods to ensure fresh products as well as fast services as the industry requires. McDonald’s uses core warehousing that is a web-based system meant to address the daily operations of the stores and information needed free flow of products from the stores to restaurants. The system provides online operations of inventory management, where the centralized system receives information from the restaurants concerning their request. The vendor supply according to the needs of each restaurant, ensuring that all items needed are available and no delays are recorded. Therefore, the warehousing of McDonald is very efficient considering its success in service delivery and products quality, which are only possible with efficient warehousing and logistics management for a fast foods business.

References

Cheema, P. (2011). The Big Idea; McDonald’s Unravels its Supply Chain. Retrieved from http://logisticsweek.com/feature/2011/07/the-big-idea-mcdonalds-unravels-its-supply-chain/

mcdonaldsindia.com. (n.d.). Sourcing and Storage. Retrieved from http://www.mcdonaldsindia.com/pdf/sorucing-storage.pdf

thoughtcorp.com. (2011). McDonald’s Implements a New Data Warehouse to Deliver a Single Vision for Decision Makers. Retrieved from http://www.thoughtcorp.com/images/McDonald’s%20Data%20Warehouse.pdf