News

Former '`fry girl' is the brains behind McD's tech innovations

January 27, 2004

OAK BROOK, Ill. -- The woman behind McDonald's Corp.'s equipment innovations started her career as a 16-year-old "french fry girl" at a McDonald's restaurant in Portsmouth, Va.

Lynn Crump-Caine has worked her way up the ranks to executive vice president of worldwide restaurant operations and systems at the fast-food chain, according to an article in the Chicago SunTimes

Crump-Caine now runs McDonald's Innovation Center in Romeoville, where 25 employees create and test technological breakthroughs such as automated french-fry machines and kiosks where people punch in their orders.

The center's focus is creating machinery that helps crew workers, managers and customers, Crump-Caine said. The latest innovation is a hand-held device that restaurant managers could use to report results of restaurant inspections.

The device, now being tested in the United States and already in use in places such as Brazil and the U.K., operates much like a Palm Pilot. Managers use a stylus to punch in their impressions of a restaurant's attributes that McDonald's is trying to improve -- quality, service and cleanliness. The hand-held device also may act as a sort of EZ-Pass, letting the managers enter secure locations where bar-coded passes are now required. It's expected to start being widely used in the United States this year.

Restaurant workers also are testing hand-held devices to take orders from customers waiting in drive-through lines, according to the article.

Another Innovation Center product is a McDonald's kiosk, similar to a bank ATM machine, that lets customers enter their orders into the machine in hopes of cutting mistakes and speeding up service.

The kiosks are operating at 12 McDonald's restaurants in Raleigh, N.C., and at five restaurants in the Denver area.

Crump-Caine makes it a priority to create innovations that make the customers' and employees' lives easier, with increased efficiency a secondary consideration.

One example is the self-ordering kiosk, which frees up workers to help customers or take food to parents sitting in the children's play areas.