Most Lean Practitioners are fans of Toyota and the Toyota Production System mimicking their methodologies and even using the Japanese definitions to add credibility, something that I am also guilty of BTW.
Many folks believe that in many ways Toyota likes to avoid advanced Technology and Automation which is a real myth. Toyota probably employs more automation than any other car company and they look at every Process through the eyes of a parent and if as a parent they would not like to see their child employed in that position then automate it.
Now let me preface before you read the following article ... I am NOT a fan of automated interfaces with my drug store, supermarket, gas station and until recently my bank. It still irks me that I have to pump my own gas and watch the cumulative total blurr in front of my eyes at a much faster rate that I can earn the money, or after searching in my grocery store for value to then have to stand in front of a machine to self check-out and bag my own goods ... yes I miss the service, being pampered and acknowledged by a person thanking me for my patronage.
The following article came into my in box this week and kind of gave my brain a slap of attitude adjustment. It did that from a couple of perspectives.
I admire McDonalds on how they are constantly pivoting when i was little they catered to my childhood fantasies much to the chagrin of my parents. Now McDonalds caters to being a social hub for seniors to congregate.
McDonalds has never been afraid of employing technology or automation to improve standardization or better utilization of labour. (they actually are an amazing 6-Sigma process compliance company)
With the high cost of labour they can divert their labour resources to better value creation processes.
By letting Guests create their own meal and their own pace allows the guest to be happier with the final result.
McDonalds went all in when they introduced the order-entry kiosks, they made sure there were plenty of them available within the store.
I use them and I identify as one of the statistics within the article.
Now imagine if Petroleum companies allowed for those pesky and annoying screens on the pumps to allow me to order things from the attached convenience store, instead of trying to infect my brain with loud obnoxious advertisements as I am already annoyed having to pump my own gas without compensation.
Enjoy the following article but read through the lens of implementing and adopting technology within your organization.
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The following article was written by By Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN and published September 24, 2024
Self-service kiosks at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains have loomed as job killers since they were first rolled out 25 years ago. But nobody predicted what actually happened.
In one of the earliest mentions of kiosks in fast-food settings in 1999, now-defunct trade industry publication Business Information said that McDonald’s was working to “develop an electronic order-taking system that may eventually replace some of its human equivalents.”
Instead, touchscreen kiosks have added extra work for kitchen staff and pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register. The kiosks show the unintended consequences of technology in fast-food and retail settings, including self-checkout. Chains are now experimenting with artificial intelligence at drive-thru lanes, and the experience with kiosks holds lessons for them.
Today, instead of replacing workers, companies deploy kiosks to transfer labor to other tasks like handing off pickup orders, help increase sales, easily adjust prices and speed up service. (Many chains, including Subway, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks, don’t use them much or at all.)
Kiosks “guarantee that the upsell opportunities” like a milkshake or fries are suggested to customers when they order, Shake Shack CEO Robert Lynch said on an earnings call last month. “Sometimes that is not always a priority for employees when you’ve got 40 people in line. You’re trying to get through it as quick as possible.” Kiosks also shift employees from behind the cash register to maintaining the dining area, delivering food to customers or working in the kitchen, he said.
Kiosks have shifted restaurant industry work to other positions.
Some McDonald’s franchisees — which own and operate 95% of McDonald’s in the United States — are now rolling out kiosks that can take cash and accept change. But even in these locations, McDonald’s is reassigning cashiers to other roles, including new “guest experience lead” jobs that help customers use the kiosks and assist with any issues.
“In theory, kiosks should help save on labor, but in reality, restaurants have added complexity due to mobile ordering and delivery, and the labor saved from kiosks is often reallocated for these efforts,” said RJ Hottovy, an analyst who covers the restaurant and retail industries at data analytics firm Placer.ai. Kiosks “have created a restaurant within a restaurant.”
And in some cases, kiosks have even been a flop. Bowling ally chain Bowlero added kiosks in lanes for customers to order food and drinks, but they went unused because staff and customers weren’t fully trained on using them.
“The unintended consequences have surprised a lot of people,” Hottovy said.
Even some of the benefits of kiosks touted by chains — they upsell customers by suggesting menu items and speed up orders — don’t always play out. A recent study from Temple University researchers found that, when a line forms behind customers using kiosks, they experience more stress when placing their orders and purchase less food. And some customers take longer to order tapping around on kiosks and paying than they do telling a cashier they’d like to order a burger and fries. Not to mention the kiosks can malfunction or break down.
“If kiosks really improved speed of service, order accuracy, and upsell, they’d be rolled out more extensively across the industry than they are today,” Hottovy said.
Self-service technology
Kiosks have also been threatened as a fast-food industry response to higher minimum wage laws.
“I told you so,” former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi said in 2016 after the company expanded kiosks. “I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives.”
California this year raised the minimum wage for the state’s fast food sector workers by $4 to $20. It raised a familiar refrain that those workers would be replaced by technology, such as self-service kiosks.
But the quick-service and fast-casual segments of the restaurant industry continue to grow. Staffing levels were nearly 150,000 jobs, or 3%, above pre-pandemic levels, according to the latest Labor Department data.
Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University who studies the effects of technology on work, said the impacts of kiosks were similar to other self-service technology such as ATMs and self-checkout machines in supermarkets. Both technologies were predicted to cause job losses.
“The introduction of ATMs did not result in massive technological unemployment for bank tellers,” he said. “Instead, it freed them up from low-value tasks such as depositing and cashing checks to perform other tasks that created value.”
Self-checkout also has not caused retail job losses. In some cases, self-checkout backfired for chains because self-checkout leads to higher merchandise losses from customer errors and more intentional shoplifting than when human cashiers are ringing up customers.
Fast-food chains and retailers need to do a better job communicating what the potential benefits of kiosks and self-checkout are to consumers and employees, Andrews said.
“What I think will be central for customers is that they see how this technology is providing them with more or better service rather than more unpaid busywork,” he said. “Otherwise, the public is just likely to view it as yet another attempt to reduce labor costs via automation and self-service.”
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