McDonalds

McDonald's Restaurants

McDonald's Restaurants are a multinational company operating a chain of fast food restaurants in the UK.
McDonald's embarked on an EDI roll out program more than three years ago and set up links to a number of their key suppliers to receive invoices electronically. However, in common with many companies, McDonald's discovered that, after the initial success of the roll out, the overhead of implementing their own EDI solution. This resulted in McDonald's continuing to process large volumes of paper invoices and a review of the business process was initiated.

McDonald's wished to make use of standard internet technologies to support the new processes and issued a specification of requirements to a number of companies with specialist e-business skills. After detailed investigations, Itim was appointed to work in partnership with McDonald's Restaurants to project manage the e-commerce initiative and encourage suppliers to support the process by sending invoices electronically.

McDonald's Restaurants chose Itim as its partner in this project because of:

Their willingness to assume full management responsibility for the success of the project
The provision of service based solution which avoids the need for suppliers to purchase and implement expensive and complex software
A cost effective solution for both McDonald's Restaurants and its suppliers
Fast track implementation of suppliers including ability to accept data in many formats for onward processing

Project Manager for McDonald's Restaurants, Gillian Rea, is pleased with the way in which Itim has approached the project and with the initial success rate achieved.

"Three months into the project, we are pleased that Itim are on target to meet our goal and with the way they have managed the project so far."

Matthew Howe Vice President Financial Controller at McDonald's Restaurants, says of the partnership :

"Itim has made more progress on EDI in 8 months than McDonald's had in the previous 10 years. "

About Itim

Itim's head office is based in London with Tradewind's Hosting Centre based in Plymouth in the South West of England, has been linking companies electronically since 1996. Itim provides e-business solutions and services, helping companies to make full use of the business opportunities provided by the Internet.

Itim has developed the Tradewind Internet Service Centre, providing companies with a flexible approach to exchanging information electronically with customers, suppliers and business partners. To gain the full benefit of electronic business to business document exchange, integration with back office systems is key. The Tradewind Internet Service Centre makes this integration a much more straightforward proposition, taking information in a format acceptable to the sender and delivering the same information in a format acceptable to the receiver. Where back office integration is not required, the Tradewind Service provides web form interfaces for the display and capture of business documents.

The Tradewind Internet Service Centre supports any file format, including XML and EDI and data can be transferred in a number of ways. HTTP Upload via a web browser, ftp transfer and e-mail attachments are supported, also connections to the major EDI VANs.

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