McDonald’s Riyadh: flexibility, compliance, and lean operations

McDonald’s Riyadh + Orquest: QSR scheduling software built for real operations

In Riyadh, building the weekly schedule used to take hours. Now it takes minutes. That is the first thing Qais Mohammad Ghanayem, a McDonald’s restaurant manager in the Saudi capital, mentions when asked what has changed since his team started working with Orquest QSR scheduling software.

But it is more than just the speed. It is about what it does to restaurant operations across a network of 230+ restaurants and more than 7,000 employees. Bobby Garcia, operations consultant, puts it this way: “No matter what the event is, whether it’s Ramadan or a national holiday, Orquest is very flexible. It gives us the right number of hours needed, which really helps us with Saudi labour law, targets and the cultural calendar.”

Saudi Arabia sets its own rhythm. Saudisation policies, which regulate how much of a company’s workforce must be local nationals, sit alongside demand spikes that shift completely during Ramadan and holidays that reshape operations overnight. QSR scheduling software built for that reality cannot be generic. It has to account for two layers at once: the brand standards and the local reality, restaurant by restaurant.

That is, at its core, the pattern that repeats across every market where McDonald’s operates. And there are more than 40 of them, spanning nearly every continent, all running on Orquest Smart Planning.

In Qatar, for instance, Orquest Smart Planning has helped cut overtime by 94% and improve coverage by 42%. In Jordan and Azerbaijan,, each with its own calendar of holidays and its own labour regulations, the same challenge shows up in a different shape. A restaurant manager in Amman is not managing the same constraints as one in Baku, even though both report into the same global standard McDonald’s expects everywhere. As QSR scheduling software, it adapts to each market while keeping the consistency a global brand needs across all of them.

Move outside the EMEA region and the pattern holds. The challenge does not change. Neither does the solution.

Arcos Dorados, the world’s largest McDonald’s franchisee, runs more than 2,000 restaurants across 20 Latin American countries, with close to 60,000 employees and a different labour law in every one. Before Orquest Smart Planning, managers spent six to eight hours a week building shift schedules. That time has since dropped by 90%, with associated savings in labour cost of more than $2.7 million a year across the network. In Mcdonald’s Spain, that same flexibility has translated into up to 26% less customer waiting time.

The question that tends to follow is how a single piece of QSR scheduling software can hold up under that much variation: different labour laws, different languages, different consumer habits, different franchisees operating under one brand. The answer is an AI scheduling engine built on years of experience resolving exactly this kind of variation, market by market, without losing the standard a global brand needs to maintain.

It starts with demand. Orquest’s AI forecasting predicts each restaurant’s own sales and guest patterns, channel by channel, from the counter to delivery and drive-thru, to work out what a given shift actually needs. From there, the AI scheduling engine turns that forecast into hours and tasks, so every schedule reflects exactly the coverage that restaurant needs, moment by moment. The result is a solution that balances workforce with real demand: enough people, with the right skills, at the moments that matter, within the labour law, targets, and workforce particularities of that specific country.

That is what Orquest Smart Planning has built over years of working with McDonald’s: not a template copied across markets, but an engine that absorbs the real complexity of each client and turns it into optimized schedules that comply with local law, respond to actual demand, boost operational excellence, and free up restaurant managers to focus on running the business, not the spreadsheet.

Being a strategic partner, in practice, means something concrete. It means being there before the business has to solve the problem, not after. It means the solution is built to absorb everything that comes with running a restaurant team: sales, operations, compliance, people. And it means a restaurant manager in Riyadh, Bucharest or Buenos Aires can spend their time serving customers and leading their team, not fighting a spreadsheet or obsolete QSR scheduling software.

And this is not exclusive to McDonald’s. Any restaurant or retail brand operating across multiple countries, with different labour regulations and demand peaks that shift with local culture and calendar, faces the same underlying challenge. Scale brings complexity. Absorbing that complexity without losing consistency or control over operating costs is exactly the work Orquest does, and the reason top retail and QSR brands across over 90 countries choose it as a long-term partner rather than a one-off vendor.

From Riyadh to Buenos Aires, through Doha, Amman or any of the more than 40 markets where McDonald’s and Orquest work together, the challenge is always the same: give every restaurant the exact number of hours it needs, when it needs them, within the rules of the country where it operates. And do it in minutes, not hours.