McDonalds signs Unisys in five-year $38m IT support deal

McDonalds has signed Unisys to provide IT support for restaurants in Australasia and the South Pacific, in a five year, $38.8 million deal.

Sources say the incumbent was IBM.

McDonalds said this was correct but that IBM remained a key systems integration partner for McDonalds and continued to work with it across a number of business parts.

Unisys said its New Zealand and Australian subsidiaries signed agreements to provide end-user IT support to McDonald’s restaurants in New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific region, including New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, American Samoa and Samoa. 

These five-year contracts had an estimated combined value of about $38.8 million, Unisys said.

Unisys would provide support for all the technology sitting in McDonalds restaurants, a Unisys spokeswoman said, including back-office PC equipment, wireless network, customer order display units and drive-through cameras.

Unisys would provide its Smart On-Site Services for end-to-end support of this, she said, including remote support of the technology, on-site visits and maintenance.

“It uses a whole lot of automation and logistic tools so that you can track a problem ticket from the moment that someone calls up to say, I’ve got an issue with x, to when it’s actually resolved.”

Unisys would provide 24/7 coverage, with the central service desk located in Wellington and business continuity failover based in Brisbane.

The spokeswoman said there were plans to hire more people in Wellington, but Unisys was not saying how many at this stage.

She said the businesses supported for McDonalds were in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and so it made good disaster recovery and continuity sense to have a service desk in separate locations, so that if a disaster occurred in New Zealand, Unisys could switch the desk to Brisbane.

“A good example of where we’ve had to do that in the past has been when there’s been floods in Brisbane, we’ve switched calls to New Zealand."

Reliable in-store technology was critical to providing a quality experience, McDonald’s chief information officer for Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific region Henry Shiner said.

“Our goal is to enable franchisees and restaurant managers to run their business so they can deliver the convenient, dependable and consistent service our customers expect whenever they walk into one of our restaurants.”

He said McDonalds chose Unisys because it needed a partner who could leverage a delivery capability to provide field service support across a widespread geographic region, “with the systems and rigorous processes to enable consistent, visible performance against agreed and flexible service levels.”

Unisys Asia Pacific and Japan vice president and general manager Andrew Barkla said Unisys understood how important it was for restaurant managers to access support regardless of location, and track service calls.

“We look forward to providing end-user IT support services that help McDonald’s owners and managers run their restaurants more efficiently and give patrons a superior customer experience.”