Saddled with undersized servers and suffering from monthly outages, McDonald’s recently improved its new-employee onboarding procedures from a 12-24 hour batch update to just a 10-minute process. The fast-food giant also cut down on business disruption by expediting the synchronization of employee identity data across its corporate servers from a roughly 24-hour process to two-to-four hours.
The company also struggled to keep straight a dizzying array of employee authentication requests from disparate HR sources, including training, hygiene/sanitation and point-of-sale systems, explained Ebony Love, McDonald’s director of cybersecurity service deployments, and a speaker at the Identiverse 2023 conference.
About two-and-a-half years ago, McDonald’s began addressing these difficulties, initially via an 18-month technology overhaul, and then later through a quick change in process for how it handles new employees.
First, the Golden Arches redesigned its data architecture to create a single “Golden Record” of data for its corporate and franchise employees.
“It’s not perfect real time… but it was a huge improvement,” Love told SC Media in a one-on-one video interview at Identiverse.
While those improvements did introduce improve efficiencies, they still didn’t allow McDonald’s location operators to immediately put new hires to work once they walked in the door. So the next step was to implement a simple, yet important procedural change: Now operators can put in new-employee ID requests when they’re first hired, instead of when they arrive for their first shift.
“And that would actually get [us] to the solution faster than the 18 months right that it took for us to redo the infrastructure,” said Love.
