McDonald’s Australia has transitioned to using monday.com for project management, initially to aid the delivery of a ‘fry-thru’ pop-up restaurant in Sydney for last year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup.
McDonald’s Australia’s business process lead Matt Carey.
Business process lead Matt Carey told a monday.com Elevate 2024 conference that when he arrived at corporate HQ, project management involved meetings, spreadsheets, documents, email follow-ups and manual coordination.
Carey knows the business – he worked his way up from crew to head office. He recalls learning of McDonald’s involvement in the World Cup while sitting in its Thornleigh head office in Sydney’s north.
A huge campaign of interactive experiences was planned, culminating in a special “fry-thru” restaurant serving fries and special sauces in Darling Harbour as the centrepiece.
“It’s a massive undertaking,” Carey said.
“This required an unfathomable amount of collaboration with a lot of people, all to plan and execute this campaign that would resonate with millions of McDonald’s customers as well as football fans worldwide.”
Carey was convinced it would be difficult to execute with the quick-service restaurant’s existing project management methodology and tooling.
“We were stuck on mountains of spreadsheets, under mountains of documents, and endless email chains. Everything had its own spreadsheet and data page. It was a manual nightmare,” he said.
“[Pre-FIFA] I found myself spending over 20 hours a week just trying to keep track of where everything was at, what was happening, what business approvals had happened, and what I was going to do next and who I needed to contact.”
Carey wanted to simplify project management for everyone involved: “It was about bringing a system to McDonald’s that was going to help others bring their projects to life in a more formal way, a faster way, and it’s a bit more time efficient.”
He trialled a few tools, one of which was monday.com. Through that platform, McDonald’s set up a dashboard to provide “a bird’s eye view of all our projects”.
The platform was then set up to coordinate and track “our timelines and our actionable [items], so those key measures to ensure that the project is on track.”
“In the background, we then started with some really simple automations to move things forward, eliminating the need for some of the [follow-up or coordination] emails and even meetings.”
The company has between 100 and 150 automations that aid project coordination.
“When FIFA came knocking at the door, it was the perfect time to really flex our muscles and start to use the monday.com platform and our new project management system,” Carey said.
“We had to pull out all the stops for this one.”
Using monday.com, McDonald’s “mapped out every step of the campaign, our timelines and key actionable items that we were going to need to deliver this.”
“Our interconnected [dash]boards allowed our teams, from our marketing team and ops team to our logistics and our suppliers, to work in sync, despite being in different countries, different states and different companies.
“Our leadership team, at a glance, could track our progress – exactly how we were going, without having to have endless meetings, allowing for quick decisions to be made.
“When issues arose, we then had streamlined communications and channels, which allowed rapid solutions in a less formal way.”
That allowed the “fry-thru” concept to be executed successfully.
“We bought football and fries together, which created everlasting memories,” Carey said. “We had 25 days of trade, 210 hours of actual operation, and we sold 31,632 sets [of] fries.”
The platform has since been used to underpin the execution of many more projects. It is also being used by other teams inside of head office for their own operational coordination purposes.
Carey shared a number of results.
“We’ve got our [project] tracking down from 20 hours a week to just four,” he said.
“We avoided [sending] over 20,000 unnecessary emails per month, and we continue to do that.
“And we save 1224 hours a month, which is the equivalent of seven full-time employees.”