Handhelds Make Burger King's Fast Food Even Faster

By Mitch Wagner

Burger King is deploying Palm handheld computers to program the equipment it uses to cook meals and keep food warm.

The fast-food giant hopes the Palm devices will streamline programming of its broiler and warming areas, and this kind of vertical application demonstrates a key area of growth for handheld computers.

Burger King's cookers and warmers lack full keyboards and require laborious programming. But the Palm handhelds store the correct information and then beam those settings to the broilers and warming areas via infrared technology.

"Every time a piece of meat comes off the broiler we have to put it somewhere prior to putting it in a final product," said John Reckert, vice president of R&D for Burger King. "In the past, it was done with charts and posted graphs, with paper and pencil, and in the employees' heads." That manual process takes about a half hour; he said. The Palm application does it in about 30 seconds.

In 30 stores, the company is also testing the Palm application to calibrate the system using demand projections created by each store's point-of-sale systems, Reckert said. The application will automatically tell employees how much of each product to prepare, based on demand at a given time of day.

Burger King chose Palm to integrate with a wide variety of point-of-sale systems and kitchen equipment. The point-of-sale systems vary from brand new to 20 years old. Kitchen equipment is supplied by Duke Manufacturing in St. Louis and Prince Castle Equipment in Chicago.

Written using Metrowerks Code Warrior, the application runs on any infrared-enabled Palm device, said Mark Salerno, chief technical officer for Integrated Control Corp., which built the application for Burger King. The application currently runs on the Palm m100, m505, 705, and IIIc.

Custom vertical industry applications like Burger King's have been a key area of early adoption for handheld computers, said analyst Isaac Ro of the Aberdeen Group.

"It's much easier to generate ROI with those kinds of apps," Ro said. "One of the problems we have with back-office applications is that it's hard to justify the cost. It's great to have wireless e-mail, but how do you quantify the productivity gain?" By comparison, for applications like cooking food in a restaurant, stocking store shelves, or counting inventory, it's easy to quantify the time and costs spent as well as measure results.

Though Palm currently dominates the market for handheld computing in business, Ro expects the Microsoft Pocket PC to catch up quickly. "The advantages that the Palm guys use for dominance -- price point, battery life, ease-of-use -- those are eroding," he said.

Just as important, shrinking IT budgets lead to more conservative purchasing decisions, and buying Microsoft is a safe choice. "IT managers know that Microsoft will be there in five or six years to back the product," Ro said. "That's not necessarily the case with Palm."