Business

The McDonalds Restaurants The Company and its Objectives through
Balance scorecard

McDonalds is the worlds largest fast-food restaurants chain and has more than 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. It has been seen that 15 to 20 of the restaurants are actually owned by the company while the rest is in the hands of the franchisees. With a small beginning in US it has become a gigantic multinational company with its franchisee restaurant spread across continents to even the remote corners of the planet like the Iceland.

Mission and Vision Statement
The mission as well as the vision statement of McDonalds remains true to its characteristics even today and sums up to be the worlds quick service restaurant experience. In other words, McDonald visualizes that it names should ring synonymously in the customers mind as a restaurant that stands for quality service, cleanliness, value and that which every consumer is satisfied with.

McDonalds strategies and Management Systems
The overall strategic plan of McDonalds which is also quite a unique thing altogether is well known within and outside the company as Plan to Win. Here, the underlining philosophy of McDonalds is not to be the largest fast food supplier, but to be focused on being the best fast-food chain. This means that quality is of prime most important factor for McDonalds. In other words, McDonald has made it possible for customers a great deal more satisfied on each visits than any other similar fast-food chain. This is made possible by five factors that focus on giving the very best to the customers and these are people, products, place, price and promotion. The company has its own global strategies in the form of geographical strategic plans. It is revealed that in US McDonalds strategic plans focus more on breakfast with Southern Style Chicken Biscuit during early hours while for lunch and dinner it is Southern Style Chicken sandwich. In the case of beverages McDonalds restaurants has also started introducing its unique high premium coffee. In Europe the company has a different approach and its aim is of premium offerings, classic and affordable varieties. In Asia-Pacific, Middle East and African markets McDonalds strategic plans can be summed up as offering food on convenience, breakfast and main menu and their extensions and value addition. Not only this McDonalds has several organizational strategies in place and these are better way of managing and operating a restaurant, focusing mainly on the customers, variety of choice in the menu, beverage choice and day part expansion and investments in restaurants. Further, company stays open during late nights for late comers and for catering to the mobile population. Again, by focusing itself strategically as a locally operated restaurant it gains the advantage and leverage of serving customized food globally yet be firmly rooted by the local standards and preferences. In fact, by doing so it wants each and every restaurant to be an expression of its brand name. The hierarchy in McDonalds restaurants in all countries appears quite similar and even if there are differences they have minimum impact on its basic American operating system (Royle, 2000).
     
Further, its management systems are altogether unique and have excellent systems in place with huge investments in research and manpower training. This means that any franchisee can start of immediately by implanting the system built by McDonalds. This makes the brand name quite a phenomenal force and quickly makes news everywhere. For instance, the news of relocation of a restaurant attracts very little attention, but when it is McDonalds like in Beijing it was big news (Watson, 2006).

Objectives for Improving Financial Position
The three objectives that are required for improving the financial position of the company can be done with the help of balance scorecard. The three objectives which McDonald would depend upon are the learning and growth perspective, the customer perspective and the financial perspective.

Learning and Growth perspective
One meaningful measure that the managers of McDonalds can attain is by focusing on the training funds. Each manager is allotted a certain fund to train workers and staff under him and he evaluates their performance through a performance appraisal report.

One level of expected level of performance is by giving each worker under each manager a target to fulfill. Say for instance each worker serving customers should have a preset target number of customers to be served which would increase their efficiency and performance for the overall growth and strategy of the company. The training in this regard should be imparted to the staff accordingly.

One meaningful action would be to invite suggestions from staff after their training session in order to meet the companys objectives of learning mechanism by meeting with ground realities. A number of suggestions could be analyzed and the best of them could be implemented after giving them further training and learning process.

Customer Perspective
One meaningful measure which the manager of a McDonald restaurant could set forth would be identify the performance of an employee at its restaurants is through feedback of response.

One target or expected level of performance for each restaurant is to keep its current achievement at a slightly higher level in order that the customers are served with more perfection and thereby making the cash flow even better.

The single recommended action that can be implemented is by giving a piece of cake or food item as a parting souvenir. This neednt be costly but should be attractive enough and make the customer joyous.

Financial Perspective
One meaningful measure which the manager of a McDonald restaurant ought to implement is to calculate the wastage that could be avoided in a particular area or locality. On a larger scale this could add up to the overall growth and strategy of the company.

The target here would be to calculate the financial side of each restaurant by giving stress on the particular demand of the food items. Costs could be calculated and certain food items could be produced less if it is not viable at certain location.

The recommended action would be to give stress to those items that are cost effective and at the same time in demand. By giving more freedom to manager in managing funds and getting feedback from each unit the company can grow significantly. This perhaps shows in the accounting records which points to a fall in fast food items in US due to the downturn. Sales at US restaurants fall 0.6 percent which shows the latest signs of weakening in the fast food sector (Dorfman and Baertiein, 2009).