Cloud data and analytics services: Driving the McDonald’s business forward one byte at a time
The implementation of a standard, cloud-based, petabyte-scale data warehouse is allowing McDonald’s to process and analyze data faster than ever and enables leaders to optimize decision-making.
by Matt Sandler, Senior Director, Data Products & Analytics and Ron Strong, Director of Data Platforms & Architecture
While our core menu items have remained the same for ages, over the last few years, we have undergone some dramatic technology changes. This is especially apparent with the upgrade of our customer-facing digital footprint — we now offer a mobile app, in-store kiosk, home delivery, and a loyalty program.
We’ve seen firsthand how our customers have enthusiastically embraced our new digital platforms. A trip to the airport last year revealed a queue at the digital kiosk and none at the front counter! This, along with the burgeoning popularity of McDonald’s Mobile Global App — which had over 40 million downloads in the US in 2022, alone — paints a clear picture: The future of dining is digital.
Today, digital systemwide sales in our top six markets represent nearly 40% of their systemwide sales. This means that we’re able to leverage the data and learnings from this technology to help us steer business decisions and transform the experiences of our customers and crew.
The challenge
As a global company that started decades before modern cloud technology, we found ourselves splintered into silos, with pockets of data around the world, which meant issues were being inefficiently addressed. As data surged, the company wrestled with data-related hurdles, like processing delays, performance bottlenecks, and steep costs with our previous on-premises solutions.
We wanted to drive analysis faster, power modern machine-learning analytics in areas, like marketing and supply chain and ensure McDonald’s leaders could access the data they need.
Our solution
We knew we needed to standardize to capitalize on our global scale, bringing the data from all platforms and markets together into a unified place.
So, we implemented a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud, based on AWS. It started a few years ago, with a departmental Redshift cluster, then expanded until all of our key data was on the cloud and available globally. The cloud transformation included rebuilding key areas to leverage modern, cloud-native services — something a mere data lift-and-shift wouldn’t achieve.
Moreover, we’re now using Redshift capabilities to independently scale compute and store, and enable fast query performance and lower costs. This also enables automated on-demand read-and-write concurrency scaling during periods of peak usage.
Today, our cloud-native global data warehouse serves the needs of over 50,000 data and analytics users, handling 260,000 queries a day.
Thanks to the combination of extensible business insights tools and advanced analytics tools that our data scientists leverage to work with programming languages, we now have capabilities and capacity to answer important business questions on-demand.
Business benefits
We’re now processing and analyzing data faster, providing higher quality access to company decision-makers, and seeing cost reductions. Our data capabilities allow us to discover and iterate even more effectively on key patterns of buying behavior by menu item, customer segmentation, loyalty usage, and other dimensions.
As McDonald’s continues to delve deeper into standardizing and optimizing our business, Global Technology remains committed to leveraging our data’s potential and helping people enjoy more McDonald’s great-tasting food. It’s an exciting time, and we can’t wait to see where the journey leads us!
