McDonald’s Switzerland simplifies planning across 173 restaurants

The first McDonald’s to open its doors in Switzerland opened in November 1976 in Geneva. Employing 25 people for this opening, it offered a range of 8 products, writing the first chapter of a long and very successful story. Today McDonald’s Switzerland, headquartered in Crissier, employs 7,200 employees in 173 restaurants, including 152 franchisees. They welcome 300,000 guests every day.

McDonald’s sees itself more as a community than a company. “In our context, it’s interesting to compare franchisees to find out how to improve the profitability of each restaurant. Our challenge is to define the best possible standard. But collecting the necessary information from each franchisee and consolidating it in Excel took too much time,” explains Thomas Mosimann, McDonald’s CFO. However, he rejects the idea of entrusting this task to a service provider: “Being able to model assumptions ourselves based on our performance data is the quickest way to implement internal ideas.”

McDonald’s decided to expand its use of Jedox in 2019 beyond planning and budgeting to carry out reporting for its franchisees as well. Using Jedox since 2014 for the restaurants it manages itself, about 12% of its operations, with a data cube that allows simple generation of a variety of different reports. “The idea of using Jedox for our franchisees had been around for a long time, but we waited to ensure sufficient maturity for the internal development of our projects. We had been evaluating other solutions since 2014, but the more we mastered Jedox, the more convinced we became of its effectiveness,” says Thomas Mosimann.

McDonald’s receives performance data in the form of CSV files from franchisees. With Jedox, this data is seamlessly integrated into Jedox via an ETL and organized in a data cube, from which reports can easily be generated.

The ETL and the cube were developed in only two months by three team members who do not specialize in IT. The Jedox Partner, Linalis, then provided support to implement the final reports. “We had made mock-ups, but it’s good to have the external advice of an expert who knows the solution from start to finish. For example, we had imagined producing results in ten formulas, but Linalis found a way to achieve this in just three formulas.

The reports show key figures by region and by restaurant: speed of service, number of customers served per hour, etc. This information is regularly updated semi-automatically: “We decided that the reports would only be refreshed at the touch of a button when we are ready for the next period.”

This information is presented in the form of charts and tables and view info down to a granular level. Above all, once McDonald’s Switzerland added Jedox Cloud to their solution, these reports can be consulted by field operations managers if required. “Our managers are all over Switzerland and it was important for them to access the reports without having to return to headquarters. For example, they have quick access to a technical view of a restaurant with them when they visit the site in person.”

The reports produced using Jedox provide so much rich data that McDonald’s uses them for other areas as well. For example, each member of the management team can track their budget, their expenses and the funds remaining until the end of the year at any time, on-demand. “We can see the cost of the raw materials needed. The solution is so efficient that we now do all our cash flow on Jedox,” says Thomas Mosimann, adding that around 15 people use these reports.

He is also pleased with the ergonomics of the solution:

For example, if I see a deviation on my dashboard, I can easily point and zoom in to see the details and understand where the problems that caused the deviation are located. There is also an aesthetic aspect to the interface that is just as important.

Thomas Mosimann, CFO, McDonald’s Switzerland

In the end, the CFO of McDonald’s Switzerland acknowledges the significant time and resource savings that Jedox delivers. “We no longer need to manually enter data in Excel, assign colors, etc.”, he says. The teams were able to free up their time to analyze other data. And that was essential, because “Generally speaking, our business is growing. We intend to go even further with Jedox. Next year we will be implementing a sales forecasting module for franchisees,” he concludes.