Kineo and McDonald’s case study

Helping teams to run more profi table restaurants through award- winning e-learning – and saving over £1 million on the way

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O201

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

This case study shows how McDonald’s UK and Kineo have partnered to develop e-learning solutions that:

• Are award-winning examples of using the Articulate authoring tool • Provide a fl exible way to partner and give McDonald’s control • Have generated over £1 million ($1.75 million) in cost savings in their fi rst year • Have directly contributed to profi tability increases in line with their initial objectives

You can see a sample module in action at:http://www.kineo.com/demos/mcd_artic_demo/mcd_demo/player.html

The challenge:: “Can you run a McDonald’s restaurant prof itably? Can e-learning help?”

Using Articulate to develop quality – rapidly

It is a complex task balancing staff and material costs, sales, quality and customer service all whilst ensuring you’re making a profi t. You need a deep understanding of the various components and how they interact to deliver quality and profi tability.

This is something McDonald’s have excelled at for many years and developing these skills in their restaurant managers is a crucial task. McDonald’s in the UK have traditionally delivered a series of one-day courses; on restaurant business controls and fi nancial management, to over 1,000 staff each year, across 1,250 restaurants. This is an expensive way to train, and McDonald’s wanted to create an alternative approach using e-learning, that would enable managers to: receive training when they needed it; use learning for performance support; provide update training; and to reduce the costs of delivery.

The objectives for the new approach were to:

• Meet the criteria of McDonald’s overarching L&D strategy (modern, engaging, just in time, meeting specifi c business needs, relevant to learners, delivering time and cost benefi ts, and enabling competitive advantage)• Increase the speed of learning transfer into the workplace • Provide refresher training opportunities in a way that face-to-face can’t do alone• Save time and costs, especially relating to travel and opportunity costs

Kineo collaborated with McDonalds to design and develop engaging e-learning that delivered on these objectives.

The business controls training comprised three modules:

• Financial Skills• Inventory Management• Crew and Management Scheduling

The e-learning needed to be delivered in an attractive and engaging design that fully supported McDonald’s brand and standards for quality and style.

McDonald’s worked with Kineo to develop a prototype of the e-learning, using the Articulate rapid e-learning authoring tool as a test case to see if it would meet McDonald’s requirements. Kineo has worked extensively with Articulate for clients, including O2, BP, Cable&Wireless and M&S, and has brought experience of the tool’s considerable capabilities – and tricks – to the prototype phase.

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O202

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

The prototype included a range of standard items such as a menu that could slide up for the learner to navigate directly to specifi c sections, help or resources, and a simple page progress indicator. Below is an image with the menu displayed.

The key requirements of the prototype were to:

• Include complex interactions showing the relationship between the various elements and the impact of fi xed and variable costs, as a launch point for follow-up discussions in each restaurant • Develop an approach that meets the specifi c brand requirements for the business control course• Deliver a wide range of rich interactions to keep the learners cognitively engaged with the learning• Prove that a complex topic like this can be delivered via e-learning and using Articulate

The prototype used an Articulate skin developed by Kineo to allow McDonald’s full control over the branding and positioning of elements such as the logo. The skin design is below.

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O203

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

Teamwork – getting the best from everyone

An engaging e-learning approach that ref lected McDonald’s design valu es

The project was very much a collaborative venture. Kineo developed the initial prototype based on content and scripts developed by the McDonald’s team.

As the project moved into full production, members of the McDonald’s team worked side by side with the Kineo team, getting trained up on the Articulate skin and templates and feeding back on the content.

The key to a rapid development project is fl exibility. In this case some modules were started by McDonald’s and fi nished by Kineo, others worked in reverse. The usual client/vendor lines were blurred as we worked together as a development team to deliver to deadlines and requirements.

We prefer to work in this way because you get the best from everyone. As with all projects an e-learning developer brings learning design skills, creative art direction ideas and good technical skills but the internal team is key to providing:

• Context on how the learning will be used• In-depth content knowledge• Understanding of the target audience

The result in this case was great collaboration and an excellent fi nal product that we and McDonald’s consider a showcase piece in the use of Articulate to develop engaging, branded e-learning that’s easy to maintain and update.

The key to providing a consistent experience throughout the e-learning was to develop an Articulate skin and templates. Regardless of whether the screen was built using Articulate Quizmaker, Engage, PowerPoint or a custom animation, the skin and templates provided a uniform look and feel.

The prototype was developed in a matter of days. The result convinced McDonald’s that Articulate fully met their requirements for an easy-to-use tool that would allow us to develop content quickly, while also delivering engaging e-learning and meeting strict branding requirements. Because it’s easy to use, many staff can develop skills quickly to be able to create and maintain content.

As a result, McDonald’s now uses Articulate extensively. Below we outline in more detail how the various requirements were met.

1 The skin

The skin we developed is a Flash fi le that sits in front of the published Articulate output. It has a transparent central panel and calls functions such as menu, next and resources tabs.

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O204

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

2 PowerPoint template

The fi rst stage was to create a PowerPoint template using the same background and with the sepia styled text boxes, which is a consistent theme throughout the e-learning. Below is an example of the PowerPoint template used in conjunction with the skin.

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O205

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

Below is one of the Quizmaker templates with the Articulate skin. Again, the design followed the theme of sepia style text backgrounds.

Below is the Engage template. We used the editable Engage schemes to create a background that merges with the skin design. The Engage header is hidden behind the Articulate skin header.

3 Quizmaker template

4 Engage template

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O206

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

It’s key that learners know where they are and what’s expected of them as they progress through the module. As part of the overall design we created a series of heading icons to provide clear signposting to the learner throughout the modules.

Articulate, combined with Quizmaker and Engage, enabled us to create a wide range of rich interactions to explain concepts to the learners and keep them engaged. We used Quizmaker extensively throughout the module to ask formative questions and to check the learner’s understanding as they progressed.

The nature of the e-learning required us to create a few custom Flash pieces, for example; to calculate returns based on diff erent levels of sales we created a custom animation. This was inserted into a PowerPoint slide and integrated with the rest of the module. Some examples are shown below.

Clear signposting

Complex f inancia l interactions

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O2

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

07

Workbook activities – working with the blend

Links to tools – helping learners take it further

The learning was a blended approach. In this case, the blend meant that there were follow-up activities in restaurants to ensure transfer to the workplace. We sought to reuse existing workbooks, thus throughout through the modules there are activities where the learner is referred to the workbook to complete an activity.

The nature of the content also meant that learners needed to understand and be able to use certain tools and templates on the job to improve business control. Within Articulate we were able to link directly to these tools.

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O2

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

08

The quality of the fi nal design and learning was exceptional given the fast development timetable, and fully supported the McDonald’s brand values.

The results have been exceptional, and we’ve summarized them here.

Over 1,000 people have completed the e-learning and the feedback has been very positive. Internal McDonald’s surveys have shown the following feedback:

• McDonald’s estimates that this single project has saved more than £280,000 ($440,000) year to date relating to just travel time. • Overall the savings estimates provided by McDonald’s for all of our e-learning work to date (approx 12 months) is in excess of £1m ($1.75m), which refl ects a huge return on investment.

The purpose of the e-learning was to lead to business results. While there were other contributing factors, in 2009 the business has seen the following results:

• 10% sales growth • 6% transaction growth • Food profi tability key performance indicators improved by between 0.05% and 1% in the pilot restaurants (very signifi cant in a low-margin business, and directly related to the aims of

the learning)• The pilot managers moved their restaurants higher up the national balanced scorecard • Signifi cant cost savings as documented above

Learner engagement is great, of course. But for e-learning to be considered a success, it needs to deliver tangible results for the business. We’re happy to report that it certainly did that.

The payoff: results

Learner engagement

Cost savings

Business benef its

Statement

This training is relevant to my job

I can put into practice what I have learnt

There are materials to support my training

I am scheduled to spend time on training and development

I have received the training and information I need to do a good job

2009 % agree

94%

91%

94%

72%

92%

© Kineo 2010 - Rapid e-learning partnership: Kineo and O2

Kineo and McDonald’s case study

09

Through the implementation of the skin and innovative use of Engage and Quizmaker, we’ve jointly developed what we believe is an exemplary piece of Articulate e-learning. It features a strong visual presence and high level of engagement and at a fraction of the cost and time compared to other development methods. It’s led to McDonald’s UK adopting Articulate as their tool of choice for e-learning.

The modules are straightforward for McDonald’s to maintain and update, which is a key success criteria given that the solution may need to be adapted to refl ect changes in the business climate.

The e-learning can be accessed from any computer, which means learners can brush up on the fi nancial skills whenever they need to, saving on the need for expensive face-to-face refresher training, which can’t be delivered on demand.

McDonald’s view of the project is summarized in this quote:

“This e-learning and blended approach to development has genuinely improved the learning outcome for our participants. Our internal staff satisfaction survey has shown increases in all the training categories proving employee engagement and an increased ability of participants to transfer learning into the workplace. The programme has brought about signifi cant cost saving in the delivery of training and the improved learning outcomes also led to an improvement in the key fi nancial metrics of the restaurants.“

~ Carole Williams, Head of Corporate Training, McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd

Effective use of Articulate to create rapid e-learning

Ease of maintenance

Just-in-time delivery