“Orquest ensures the right employee is in the right place at the right time”

Orquest has partnered with Premier Restaurants Romania, the operator of McDonald’s restaurants in Romania.

McDonald’s leads the restaurant market in the country, with 104 locations across 32 cities, including 57 McDrive restaurants and 64 McCafé cafes. The company employs over 6,000 people dedicated to providfreeing consumers with their favorite products, prepared with quality ingredients.

Orquest enables McDonald’s Romania to enhance customer experiences and foster a positive work environment through its smart team scheduling solution. This partnership aligns with McDonald’s commitment to community impact, innovation, and team well-being, contributing to overall operational efficiency.

In this interview, we speak with Florin Tomegea, Restaurant Solutions Group Manager in the Operations Department, to discuss Orquest’s impact since its recent implementation.

Can you please introduce yourself, tell us your role and how long you have been with McDonald’s?

My name is Florin Tomegea, part of McDonald’s team for over 29 years, since the brand entered the Romanian market. 

Since 2017, I am Restaurant Solutions Group Manager in the Operations Department, responsible with areas such as EOTF (Experience of The Future), New Business Opportunities and Sales channels (McDelivery), Brand extensions growth (McCafé), Managing Complexity of the business and some other projects triggered from McDonald’s Global Strategy or by the local business needs.

Before implementing Orquest, how did you handle employee scheduling and demand forecasting, and what were the primary pain points in this process?

For more than 10 years we’ve used a different application for scheduling. As our business grew year by year, our need was to have an integrated VLH and to monitor the full compliance of the planning process.

Orquest’s AI-powered planning engine is designed to optimize staffing by predicting demand and adjusting schedules accordingly. What have been your initial impressions of how Orquest has transformed your scheduling process? 

We can say that Orquest allows our Operations Consultants to have easy access to evaluate and monitor daily the scheduling of our people. A tool with various capabilities and with a wide range of reports that covers the need in the operational area.

How have your teams responded to the new solution? What feedback have you received from shift managers and employees so far?

Even though this schedule solution has a user-friendly interface and after all settings are correctly done any manager can use it, it also has a lot of technological resources, it is complex and requires consistent exercise and training to gain expertise.

In other words, as in the case of any major change impacting a large company, all Kubler-Ross stages were met. Now, we face the last one, Acceptance, with our store managers being open to exploring opportunities and actively cooperating.

In terms of operational efficiency, Orquest has helped many McDonald’s globally reduce customer wait times and optimize labor costs. Can you share any early successes or improvements?

I would say that it is still premature to have an in-depth analyze on the speed of service or costs optimization, but we can see benefits already for our market. I would mention the compliance with HR policies, integration feature with MyStore (Sales, GC, P-mix), the wide range of reports available, the Orquest Self Service App (real-time notifications, requests, schedule visibility), the management of crew transfers between restaurants. 

Variable Labor Hours (VLH) is a key metric in optimizing staffing at McDonald’s. How has standardizing processes like VLH across your restaurants helped improve efficiency, and how is Orquest contributing to this effort?

The VLH was the main reason in choosing the Orquest solution in our journey of finding a suitable scheduling option. A solution to really address the needs of the restaurant and help in the operational effort of ensuring that we have the right employee at the right place and time, a very challenging aspect, but a vital condition for achieving ambitious results.

Can you comment on the implementation process, how it was?

The implementation process is a long one but works smoothly. The Orquest teams are formed by professional experts, guiding the journey efficiently. I would also highlight here the importance of having a very strong internal team, fully dedicated, and formed by individuals well experienced in Operations, experts in EOTF positioning and procedures.

Why choose Orquest over other software, and would you recommend it?

For us, the solution worked very well in the pilot phase, and the fact that has been already crafted taking into consideration our business specificities added more value.

As Orquest rolls out, what are your expectations for improving operations, and how do you foresee Orquest playing a role in McDonald’s Romania’s future growth?

I believe that this scheduling system, adaptable to the needs of our local market, can help in finding more efficient solutions in dealing with daily unpredictable events that add complexity to the restaurant management, such as schedule-related delays or last-minute changes. 

Finally, if you could describe Orquest in just a few words, what would those be? 

I would describe Orquest as a useful tool for optimizing available resources and proposing smart solutions on how we should distribute our current available crew members to cover the restaurant low activity periods and peak hours, considering the specific conditions of each location.