I was recently perusing a folder of clipped magazine articles I have collected and an article in the February 25, 2007 issue of Business Week caught my attention.  The article was a a special report written by Michael Arndt called "McDonald's 24/7." The article discussed how the move to a 24/7 operating format at McDonald's has increased the overall performance of the company.

What was especially interesting was that the success of the last two years is largely rooted in their product development efforts. Not only are they developing products that meet the needs of a consumer base that is always on the run, their products are developed with an emphasis on speed and simplicity of preparation. As written in the article "One reason McDonald's is creating crowd-pleasers again is that it has become much more rigorous in product development...The company doesn't just assess sales. It also monitors costs and margins and judges how easy a new product is to prepare by a crew that is constantly changing."

The ease of preparation is critical facet of speed and in turn financial performance. Creating a process that is repeatable by humans with minimal training assures margin and quality goals are met. It eliminates interpretation and the opportunity for errors and waste.

Over the last couple of decades, many productivity improvements have largely been gained by the introduction of computer processing or what is called digitization. Digitization takes processes that were once done by human beings and computerizes them. This eliminates the variability largely created by human interpretation, training, and general work ethic. The McDonald's approach to product development and execution is an excercise in human digitization. Blending the right materials, equipment, automation, and assembly flow to achieve a repeatable result with minimal training. The sophistication in the system is in its capability to simplify the work so that as long as people understand that red = stop and green = go you can produce the right result. For a work force that turns over greater than a 100% in a year, this is critical.

Our DemandCaster^TM service is based on this idea of repeatable digitized processes.  Our approach is built on the premise  that our users may change and in many cases the company will be better served in directing their attention to more value added tasks.  As such, we have digitized many of the normally time consuming demand management tasks into a simple process that provides the essential information necessary to make inventory optimization decisions in an absolute manner.