Decision Support Systems

In today’s competitive business environment, using Decision Support Systems is beneficial for the Restaurant industry. There are more than 24,000 restaurants in New York City. Some restaurants ran for a long time. Some restaurant closes within a short period of time. An owner and/or manger of a restaurant always improve their services and sometimes they have to make big decisions in order to enhance sales.

A Decision Support System is a computer application program that analyses business data that helps enhances a person’s decision. The Decision Support Systems (DSS) was investigated and built by researchers about 40 years ago. The theory was developed in the1970sand continued to develop the system of Data warehouses, Executive Information Systems, OLAP and Business Intelligence. Finally, the chronicle ends with knowledge-driven DSS and the implementation of Web-based DSS beginning in the mid-1990s. The field of computerized decision support is expanding to use new technologies and to create new applications. [1]
Decision support system includes knowledge-based systems . A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, and personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. [2] Decision Support Systems helps you to resolve everyday business questions by reporting, monitoring and analyzing data. By implementing the DSS it is able to reduce the cost, increase profit and also the restaurant can improve their customer service and hospitality.

McDonald’s corporation is the world’s largest fast food chain restaurant; people probably will find McDonalds wherever you go to in USA.
In 1940, Maurice and Richard ("Mac" and “Dick") opened a restaurant in San Bernardino, California . [3] Starting from a small hamburger shop in 1940, by 1973, there were 10,000 restaurants in USA.
The company continued to grow and reached 20,000 restaurants by 1981. Today, McDonald's does business in 118 countries and 32,000 restaurants around the world. McDonalds serves about 47million customers a day.
McDonalds started with a small restaurant and business grew continually.

The company keeps evolving and improving and making developments and recently by using technology as an aid, McDonalds have made better decisions.
McDonalds uses Information system efficiently. The company uses various systems such as: Transaction Processing System (TPS), Decision support system (DSS), Management Information Systems (MIS), POS system (Scale of Point system) and Hyperactive Bob system.
Management information systems involve three primary resources: technology, information, and people, and the most important resource is people, the information that we get supports the routine decision making in the functional areas. [4] Macdonald also uses decision support system. For example,
McDonalds analyze the market well to come with opportunity, as we know we live in the time of technology, so McDonalds thought of providing wireless services, so the company gather information about the customer usage of wireless services, length of stay and sales level, then the decision support system analyze the data to come up with the decision of providing wireless service in their restaurant. [5]

McDonald’ management strategy is unique and challenging. Therefore McDonald’s achieved many things with its management techniques. One of the achievements was that McDonald renovated 11,000 restaurants about 10 years ago. The Interior was changed to become more bright and clean, so the image of McDonalds changed. The customer felt more comfortable and enjoyed eating their food and even the McDonalds kid’s play room was attractive to many small children.

Recently People are more concerned about food calorie and so McDonalds changed some of their menu and added some healthy menu items such as salad or yogurt.
Also the taste of coffee has been improving. As a result 70% of coffee sales improve within a few years. McDonalds launched a special coffee menu “Mc Café” a few years ago. The customer is able to buy a cappuccino or café latte instead of going to other coffee shops such as Starbucks. This happened during the bad economy, I think this is very unique and big decision for the fast food restaurant.

Making decisions are challenging. However, as I see some examples from McDonald’s corporation management strategy, company sometimes has to face challenging situation. In my conclusion, Using advanced technology; it makes it easier for the decision maker to make the right call.


[1] http://dssresources.com/history/dsshistory.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_support_system
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_McDonald's
[4] http://mcdonaldsmis.blogspot.com/p/mcdonalds-is_04.html
[5] http://mcdonaldsmis.blogspot.com/p/mcdonalds-is_04.html