McDonald's is determined to put the fast back into fast food. Although the company has been doing well, it has ranked lower in customer satisfaction surveys than most of its competitors for several years. But all that is changing as the company has increased the size of its burgers, added specialty coffee drinks and $1 chicken sandwiches.
They're also speeding up service. In fact, the company is pretty much fanatical about shaving seconds off each customer's drive through time, running huge warehouses where employees are timed to determine appropriate work flow efficiencies. The software is also getting an upgrade.
New software would update the complicated abbreviations of the touch-screen register with simply labeled, icon-like pictures of food. The system, which is in about 5,000 restaurants out of the company’s 32,000 locations, is easy to learn and may cut as many as 10 seconds off workflow, said Laurie Gilbert, the center's director.
That saved time may squeeze another five cars in the drive-through lane per hour, said Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomic. McDonald's currently aims to serve most customers within 90 seconds of taking their order.
"It's going to enhance repeat business, improve loyalty and push more people through the lines faster," Tristano said. "People expect convenience and demand it, and if restaurants don't deliver against it, then they’re failing."
Behind the counter, a redesigned assembly area has three sides for workers to pack food into bags, while a new, shorter preparation table promises to be more energy efficient: It holds 50 percent more cooked burgers and chicken breasts, and it lifts a bread steamer, used for Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, to hip level so workers need not bend over for each order.
The company has experimented with self-serve kiosks, but those experiments didn't turn out so well. It took the customers much too long to figure out the touch screen ordering menu.
McDonald's is determined to put the 
