Supply Chains Ensuring Adequate Quality Requirements for McDonald's - Research Paper Example

The kitchen follows visual signs to take orders from the customer service desk which is placed right in front of the kitchen to enable quick response. The moment customer service executive sitting at the front desk receives an order, he transfers the information to the kitchen which is displayed on a video screen. The fresh bun is prepared in the new machine toasts within 11 seconds. This special toast which has the ability to prepare buns fast eliminates the need to keep buns beforehand and then heat them when the customer places an order.

This causes the freshness of bun to reduce at two places. First, when the bun is kept in storage for long times waiting for the customer order and second when it is heated. Though McDonald’s has defined strict quality parameters to ensure freshness of its products which includes discarding of the material if it has been kept in the storage for longer than a particular pre-defined amount of time, the new technology of preparing the bun only when a customer requires is based on the pull production system.

This eliminates wastage, which was happening earlier, and also saves time. This can be seen from the diagram where it says that the earlier process took 20 to 30 seconds while now it only takes 11 seconds. Thus, by introducing a pull production system and JIT (prepare the bun just in time to deliver the order to the customer) manufacturing, the company has eliminated waste. Not only this, by introducing a visual display of the order, the staff in the kitchen can be ready for the job beforehand, which will further reduce wastage of time.