If they underestimate either, the lines begin to form and it's too late -- it's no longer fast food. If a manager overestimates, profits head for the trash along with food that has a very short shelf life.
It's not enough to know that your restaurant sells 120 burgers during the lunch hour on weekdays. Managers must know during which 20 minutes the kitchen will go into high gear during that hour, and it's always a shifting target, Currie said.
"We can get 65 [orders] in the first 20 minutes," he said. "This allows us to cook very precisely."
The fast-food environment could be perfect for recognition software because the limited menu increases the odds of predicting correctly, said Kerien Fitzpatrick, president of HyperActive.
And it doesn't have to be perfect for it to work, he said.
"Let's say we know that there's a Big Mac promotion and we know that there are five cars in the drive-through in six minutes. We know that there is a 100 percent likelihood, based on collected data, that someone will order a Big Mac within the next three minutes," he said. "Each location is different, and those decisions are partly based on whether there are minivans or cars, or pickup trucks, what has happened in the past and what is going on in real time."
HyperActive Bob has a memory that bases predictions on what it has learned at a particular restaurant, but it remains to be seen whether the technology can be used in mass scale, Fitzpatrick said.
Company officials flew to Florida last week to set up the system at two more restaurants that serve far more meals than those near company headquarters.
Officials at McDonald's headquarters outside Chicago said franchisees have wide latitude in how to run restaurants, and said there are no plans as of yet to use HyperActive Bob on a larger scale.
"These are entrepreneurs who are always looking for ways to maximize efficiencies and they are very creative," spokesman Bill Whitman said. "Our franchisees have begun initiatives to run all of our restaurants better and changed the menu with things like the Big Mac and the Filet-O-Fish."
The time it requires to train new hires has been reduced from three months to just over a week when using the system, Currie said.
"You can imagine the stress it takes off my people in the kitchen," he said. "I've got five people in there cooking all these different products and they're all yelling, 'I need this,' 'I'm down to two of these.' A lot of that is gone."
