This is all second-hand and probably wrong, but I worked for MuleSoft shortly after McDonalds began to pull the plug on them after they experienced two regional outages. The outage was a matter of minutes, not hours, but payments weren’t affected. It only affected, as far as I know, kiosks - this was before they were everywhere.
I can imagine this will cost a few heads at McDonalds who didn’t have a DRP or BCP which included secondary payment infrastructure. Even if you were paying double retail rates and ate the cost for your franchisees, it would have been worth it.
For a company so dependent on external vendors, I’m surprised we don’t see more outages. I was always surprised to hear they outsourced their integration infrastructure for the core business. I’m sure it’s like that elsewhere given the number of customer stories floating around for McDonalds.
They have the capital, brand, network and infrastructure to be a tech powerhouse. But they’re not.
Massive IT failures like this are even worse for attracting franchisees though. People won't stop buying burgers today out of fear that they'll have to buy burgers elsewhere tomorrow.
It's not in their culture. I worked for a number of equipment suppliers for years and their mode of operation was more like a small government. Send out RFPs, inspect and test the prototypes from various companies, vote on the best ones, deploy. I can't imagine it's any different for their IT. Their expertise is in supply chain integration. Oh wait, that's HAVI.
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This is all second-hand and probably wrong, but I worked for MuleSoft shortly after McDonalds began to pull the plug on them after they experienced two regional outages. The outage was a matter of minutes, not hours, but payments weren’t affected. It only affected, as far as I know, kiosks - this was before they were everywhere.
I can imagine this will cost a few heads at McDonalds who didn’t have a DRP or BCP which included secondary payment infrastructure. Even if you were paying double retail rates and ate the cost for your franchisees, it would have been worth it.
For a company so dependent on external vendors, I’m surprised we don’t see more outages. I was always surprised to hear they outsourced their integration infrastructure for the core business. I’m sure it’s like that elsewhere given the number of customer stories floating around for McDonalds.
They have the capital, brand, network and infrastructure to be a tech powerhouse. But they’re not.
https://www.mastercardservices.com/en/dynamic-yield/case-stu...
https://blogs.mulesoft.com/digital-transformation/business/m...
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/mcdonalds/
https://www.evoke-creative.com/projects/mcdonalds
https://www.abbyy.com/customer-stories/mcdonalds-relies-on-a...
https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2023/mcdonald-s-corporat...
You call it the "core business", but is it? Isn't McDonald's core business real estate?
https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
They still need to make sure the restaurants on top of them are generating money. Otherwise they'd just build self-storage units on each one.
Not really. All they have to ensure is that enough people hope to succeed at franchising that they keep pulling in money.
Quiznos literally sucked their franchise owners dry, but it took a while.
Subway has been extracting wealth from their franchise owners since the very inception of the "$5 footlong" and they're still around.
They don't _have_ to but they'll make more money and their share of additional income will be close to 100%.
Massive IT failures like this are even worse for attracting franchisees though. People won't stop buying burgers today out of fear that they'll have to buy burgers elsewhere tomorrow.
You can bet that the franchise fees won't be pro-rated. That explains all of this.
It's not in their culture. I worked for a number of equipment suppliers for years and their mode of operation was more like a small government. Send out RFPs, inspect and test the prototypes from various companies, vote on the best ones, deploy. I can't imagine it's any different for their IT. Their expertise is in supply chain integration. Oh wait, that's HAVI.