Phil Le-Brun joined McDonald's Corporation as vice president for global technology development at the start of 2017. In the short time since he arrived, he has been part of the team helping facilitate the company's business turnaround. A combination of technology and updated 'Experience of the Future' stores, with self-ordering kiosks, an ordering and payment app, and kerbside pickup, have underpinned the transformation. During the year a custom-developed mobile-commerce application was rolled out to over 20,000 restaurants, allowing customers to place orders and pay. The new technologies have allowed customers to engage with McDonald's how they want, when they want, driving profitable, customer-centric growth. From a standing start, Le-Brun and his team also developed and deployed a home delivery solution for over 7,000 restaurants in multiple countries. The AWS Reinvent conference featured the system as a cutting-edge use of a cloud-native microservices architecture. The platform scales to 20,000 orders per second with less than 100-millisecond latency, and its open APIs allow easy integration with global delivery partners. Le-Brun also rates it for offering his developers a good learning experience in implementing DevOps in a complex distributed environment, conferring a much higher level of agility on technology initiatives.
