Wincor Nixdorf & McDonalds order entry kiosks in Europe
Wincor official says at their yearly show that McDonalds Europe is planning on rolling out 2000 order entry terminal kiosks across Europe. Historically the European McDonalds have been thought-leaders and if the rollout comes to pass that will be proved again in real life.
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Friday January 29th 2010
McDonald's to roll out self-service kiosks around Europe
As part of its rebranding exercise across its European business, food chain McDonalds is set to roll-out in-restaurant kiosks for the ordering and payment of food following a successful trial.
By Glynn Davis
Nicholas Adnitt, cash management solutions manager at Wincor Nixdorf, confirmed at the Wincor World 2010 event this week in Germany that a roll-out across Europe of as many as 2,000 kiosks could be undertaken following impressive acceptance by customers of the devices in the pilot.
"It is like the Argos kiosk model.. At busy lunchtimes customers can consider the menus, look at some of the more obscure items, and tailor individual items to maybe not include ingredients like gherkins. We found that as many as 25 per cent of people prefer to use them than the regular counters," says Adnitt.
Once items have been selected a card payment is made and the order is communicated electronically to the kitchen. At the same time, the customer receives a printed ticket whose number they can then monitor on a screen above the service counter.
Work on creating the kiosks began two years ago beginning with the physical design of the units, into which was added the hardware and software by Wincor Nixdorf, which included screens, keypads, card payment technologies and printers. The key objective was to have a standardised device that was sufficiently flexible to be used in as many as 40 different countries..
As part of the pilot 50 of the completed units have been installed in 18 restaurants in six European countries including Portugal, Austria and the Netherlands. Adnitt says the plan is to now roll out the units to restaurants based on certain criteria: "They are to be put into restaurants that have certain revenues, have a McCafe, Drive Thru's and are in certain locations."
Typically two or three kiosks will be placed in each of the selected restaurants that could represent around 10 per cent of the 6,400 McDonald's restaurants located in Europe, the Middle East ands Asia.
The UK is not yet in the plans for the roll out as Adnitt says some initial work is required to improve the reliability of the payments processing (EFT) platform within the country's restaurants before it will be reliable enough to host unattended self-service ordering and payments.
Posted by staff at January 29, 2010 02:24 PM