McDonald's also hoped to extend this detailed flow of data to the kitchen
itself, checking to ensure that the consistency of products was maintained
remotely. Though officials declined to confirm it, several sources close to
the company say Innovate eventually would have incorporated Simple
Network Management Protocol (SNMP) technology that would have
monitored every significant piece of equipment in each store. Every piece
of food storage and preparation hardware would be monitored and
managed remotely, ensuring consistency in the products worldwide and
reducing the employees needed to staff a typical McDonald's.
SNMP is the standard method used to monitor and manage network
equipment like routers, hubs and servers from network management
systems such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and Computer Associates'
Unicenter. It provides a common way to pass status information from
intelligent devices back to a monitoring system over a network. With the
addition of simple electronic monitoring devices, a network connection, and
an SNMP management information base (a piece of software that
interprets the data from the device for the monitoring system), that
"intelligent device" can be nearly anything—including a freezer, a fryer, or a
soda dispenser.
For instance, instead of reacting to a freezer that had malfunctioned
overnight, the manager would be alerted instantly by the system to the
problem. The system would also tell the manager which freezer repair
technicians were in the area and approved by McDonald's and provide the
technician with any historical data about the freezer or other McDonald's
equipment in need of repair. Early notice to an assistant manager at 10
p.m. could be the difference between a $3 fuse and losing hundreds or
thousands of dollars' worth of perishable products left unrefrigerated
overnight.
Taking Innovate to its outer limits, the folks in Oak Brook would have been
able to track the exact temperature of the oil used for french fries in any
store connected to the network. How much syrup and carbon dioxide was
in each soda tower would have been monitored.
McDonald's knows that consistency and speed are the cornerstones of its
business. The impact could range from the superficial to the disastrous.
If french fries in one restaurant had too much oil or cook even two minutes
longer than those at another restaurant, its customers are going to know
the difference. If a 16-year-old crew member isn't cooking the beef patties
long enough at the prescribed temperature of at least 140 degrees, an E.
coli bacteria breakout—and millions of dollars in lost sales and legal
settlements, to say nothing of potential loss of human life—could and has
happened.
In 1993, an E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants claimed the
lives of four children. McDonald's also could use this technology to make
life easier for its franchisees by automatically generating historical
temperature logs for food safety reports required by the Food and Drug
Administration. And it also could alert owner-operators in the event of an
