Fast food just got a bit faster

The changes have trimmed service times, shrinking queues, which attracts more customers. Photo / Greg Bowker

Thanks to new technology, Burger King is serving up its meals three to five seconds faster than last year.

Customers may not have noticed this tiny improvement in average order delivery speed, but for the fast food chain it equates to a whopper revenue growth opportunity.

Being able to process orders faster means Burger King can keep its queues at the counter and drive-through shorter, and short queues attract more customers.

"Long queues mean less customers. You're less likely to go in [to a Burger King restaurant] if you see a long queue at the drive-through," says Justin Davidson, information systems manager for TPF Group which runs the country's 69 Burger King outlets and is also the master franchise owner of the Hell Pizza chain.

Davidson was speaking in Wellington this week at an annual roadshow put on by IT giant IBM to showcase its various technologies and the businesses using them.

The IBM Forum 08 is in Auckland today and Christchurch next week.

For TPF Group, the secret to faster service has involved installing new software from Cognos, a "business intelligence" specialist IBM acquired last year.

Business intelligence solutions - a popular investment with larger companies at present - allow organisations to process the mass of data they collect through their computer systems and condense them into gems of information that management can use to improve the business.

For TPF this involves the daily collection, analysis and reporting of data from the group's 139 outlets.

"It's my job to bring in all their information every day, turn it into something meaningful for the business and deploy that information out to restaurant managers and head office departments," says Davidson.

The reports TPF's business intelligence software generates are focused on three core areas for a fast-food company: sales, inventory management and speed of service.

Reports on the previous day's trading are emailed to each outlet as PDF attachments so they can be printed out and viewed by shift managers, allowing them to respond to any problems from the previous day highlighted by the data trawl.

Davidson says the system, installed late last year, paid for itself in three months. As well as cutting order delivery by a few vital seconds, and cutting 15 hours off the time staff used to spend reconciling and dispatching reports, it has also cut food wastage costs.

"You can imagine with a restaurant you want to be keeping an eye on how effectively you're using your ingredients. Putting two slices of cheese on a burger regularly instead of one across 139 restaurants, you're going to be wasting a fair bit of expense."