I bet you think that all McDonald’s restaurants are alike, don’t you? They all have a drive-through, sell burgers, those delicious fries and the “orange drink,” right? Wrong. After spending a day with Mike Cramer, Director of Operations Research for Worldwide Restaurant Innovation at McDonald’s, I understood how each restaurant differs – even just slightly – to serve its market. I learned how he’s applying advanced analytics to allow each location to serve up a tailored experience for customers.

Through the laws of statistics that give way to a focused analytics approach, Cramer challenges restaurants to measure beyond “average” metrics such as average throughput of burgers, average number of staff, etc. He encourages McDonald’s leaders, at the restaurant level all the way through to executives, to look deeper into their data to get better answers that fuel growth.

In the spirit of this International Year of Statistics, the McDonald’s analytical approach speaks to some of the fundamentals of the field. It is a great example of how statistics can dramatically affect a mega-corporation that we all know and love.

Cramer explains his methodology in this short video.