In this interview, Mr. Mohammad Amireh, Senior Manager of Operations at McDonald’s Bahrain, shares with us valuable insights on McDonald’s Bahrain’s data-driven and customer-centric approach.  The interview delves into their commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace culture, the challenges encountered in managing restaurant operations and the strategic decision to partner with Orquest for AI-driven scheduling. Let’s explore the intersection of innovation, operational excellence and customer service in McDonald’s Bahrain journey.

Since the inauguration of your first restaurant in 1994, how have you observed changes in customer demand, and how does McDonald’s adjust to meet these evolving expectations?

Since opening our first restaurant in Bahrain almost 30 years ago, we’ve held our customers in the heart of everything we do. In today’s world, this means we’re data-driven and listen very carefully to what our customers desire & expect of us. This, along with our exceptional service & quality, has and will continue to contribute to our growth.

With Great Place to Work certification in the Middle East and being recognized as one of the best workplaces for women in the GCC, how is McDonald’s Bahrain fostering and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace culture?

We have some of the most inclusive policies in the region; extended maternity & paternity leave, flexible hours for mothers, and paid menstrual leave, and many others. Through the development & implementation of these policies, we’ve been able to prove to our employees that we truly care about them and their families, along with our fun and safe work environment.

In your role as Senior Manager of Operations, what are the primary operational challenges you encounter in managing your restaurants?

We prefer to call any challenge an opportunity to improve, and improvement is a continuous journey for McDonald’s Bahrain.

How has digital transformation, such as app-based ordering and delivery, impacted your restaurant operations, potentially adding complexity to in-store processes?

Life is changing, what was innovative in the past, is old and ripe today, digital transformation has created new touch-points to cover and might increase the order-taking and presenting channels but having such critical and innovative solutions, requires creating measures and procedures at the restaurants level to ensure operations and customers’ journey are not impacted whether they order from the front counter, or ten miles away from their homes.

Recently, we embarked on a partnership between McDonald’s Bahrain and Orquest, to schedule your restaurant teams with AI, in order to address operational challenges. Could you elaborate on the specific challenges that Orquest is helping McDonald’s Bahrain to overcome?

Scheduling the proper staff per shift to meet customers’ needs is not an easy task, it depends on science and art to get a schedule that helps maximizing quality, service, cleanliness, and sales! Relying on spreadsheets scheduling system, requires a lot of time, effort, research, and not to mention that it has high possibilities of human error. Orquest scheduling has helped reducing the time spent on preparing schedules from four hours to thirty minutes and helped achieving staffing accuracy of above 90% required labor vs actual labor.

What motivated the decision to implement Orquest at this particular time, and how do you envision it supporting McDonald’s Bahrain in maintaining operational excellence, while delivering exceptional service to both employees and customers in the future?

As mentioned before, life is going digital, relying on AI and computerized solutions won’t only reduce effort and save time, it will be appealing and easily understood to our people, we predict that Orquest scheduling will play a key role in reading our historical and projected data to produce a schedule that helps maximizing sales and QSC by not only proper number of staff per shift, but by proper positioning according to staff proficiency as well. I see Orquest helping in determining the required number of staff per restaurant when staffing and recruitment is being a concern and finally, ease the time attendance process using the crew mobile app to register their working hours and overtime.