McDonalds UAE S4 Case Study

Emirates Fast Food Company: Building a Digital Enterprise to Satisfy Customer Hunger for More

Emirates Fast Food Company LLC owns and operates McDonald’s restaurants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To deliver the consistent dining experience that customers have come to expect from McDonald’s at a growing number of restaurants across the region, Emirates Fast Food Company totally transformed its business operations. With integrated, automated, digital workflows for finance, procurement, inventory management, and HR processes, Emirates Fast Food Company can serve up a satisfying experience for customers and employees as it continues to expand.

Before: Challenges and Opportunities

•Modernize business operations; become a digital-first, data-driven company

•Support the continued expansion of the business, with 4-5 new outlets opened each year

•Ensure a consistent customer and employee experience across 185 restaurants and counting

Why SAP and SEIDOR MENA

•Integrated portfolio of SAP® cloud solutions to enable an intelligent enterprise encompassing finance, procurement, inventory management, and HR

•Expert support, guidance, and training provided by the SAP Preferred Success

•Proven implementation experience and technical expertise from SAP partner SEIDOR MENA

After: Value-Driven Results

•Consolidated disparate on-premise systems and digitalized manual, paper-based processes, accelerating workflows and increasing efficiency

•Connected all business processes in the cloud, reducing ownership and maintenance costs

•Rolled out a single HR and payroll system for 5,000-strong workforce, which serves as a single source of truth for employee data, and ensures consistency between payroll and finance systems

•Enabled 24x7 mobile access to everything from financial key performance indicators to HR services

•Increased transparency with real-time visibility of business performance

•Empowered business users with advanced reporting and data analytics tools, enabling smarter, data-driven strategic decision-making

Serving Some of the Nation’s Favorite Food

Fast food giant McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1994. Locally owned and operated by Emirates Fast Food Company LLC, McDonald’s has become one of the most popular quick service restaurants in the country, with 185 stores and counting.

Rafic Fakih, managing director of Emirates Fast Food Company LLC, says, “We are currently adding between four to five new outlets every year in the UAE. We want to keep the pace of the growth that way.”

To ensure a consistent dining experience as it continues to expand, every part of the business must be efficient, responsive, and agile. Walid Fakih, general manager at Emirates Fast Food Company LLC, confirms, “In the UAE’s highly competitive and rapidly growing quick service restaurant sector, customers want orders that are fast, consistent, and tailored to their needs. To deliver this level of service, we needed to modernize our operations.”

Previously, Emirates Fast Food Company relied on disparate on-premise systems and manual processes to support finance, procurement, inventory management, and HR operations.

Binay Moktan, HR director at Emirates Fast Company LLC, says, “We have a young, diverse, and highly distributed workforce. 75% of employees are aged between 22-28, 80% are expatriates, and they work across more than 185 sites. Paper-based HR processes were inefficient, making it difficult to manage our people effectively.”

To ensure strict, consistent quality controls across all its restaurants, deliver an exceptional experience both for customers and employees, increase agility, and enable data-driven decision-making, Emirates Fast Food Company looked to standardize, integrate, and digitalize its business processes. The separate functions and teams joined forces to deliver a successful digitalization of business processes across the company.

Building an Intelligent Enterprise

As the first step on its transformation journey, Emirates Fast Food Company selected SAP S/4HANA® Cloud as the new digital core for the company. By deploying SAP S/4HANA in the cloud, Emirates Fast Food Company eliminated the need for on-premise infrastructure, significantly reducing ownership and maintenance costs.

The company integrated all existing on-premise finance, procurement, and inventory management systems and mapped processes to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, digitalizing and automating many previously manual workflows. Today, SAP S/4HANA Cloud drives all core business processes. Sanjay Lal, finance director at Emirates Fast Food Company LLC, says, “We now have the tools to collaborate across teams efficiently – a huge plus.”

Integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP® Analytics Cloud offers users a real-time overview of business performance as well as advanced reporting, data modeling, and visualization capabilities.

SAP Analytics Cloud enables Emirates Fast Food Company to communicate operational data to all restaurants, including kitchen serving times and relationships with third-party operators. Everything that happens across the company is visible via dashboards in real time.

The company selected SAP SuccessFactors® solutions as the foundation for a new modern, mobile-first HR function. With the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution, Emirates Fast Food Company centralized, standardized, and optimized HR processes based on proven best practices. The company also implemented solutions for recruitment, performance management, and succession and development.

Integration between the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solutions ensure consistency between payroll and finance systems.