McDonald's is launch customer for Manthan

Bangalore-based Manthan Systems, a provider of specialised software solutions for the retail and consumer goods industries, has announced that McDonald's, the world's leading fast food retailer, has become the launch customer for Astra, its enterprise performance management solution.

McDonald's will use Astra's retail-centric performance management methodology to provide managers with a mechanism to communicate strategy, allocate resources, and monitor progress of execution teams.

This is the first time McDonald's has gone in for a product to plan strategy, according to a press release.

Astra leverages the power of scorecarding, benchmarking, comparisons and root cause analysis to align action at store operations to organisational strategy and initiatives.

Astra provides a systematic approach to deploy, communicate and effectively execute strategic plans, and tools to manage the execution of initiative and track it.

Sebastian Anjou, senior executive, project sponsor, McDonald's said, "Astra has delivered a visually rich method of defining and tracking performance improvement initiatives; building on our existing data warehouse and reporting environment. The roll out will significantly improve our capability to execute strategies and initiatives more effectively."

The roll-out was done for the German and Austrian operations of McDonald's in around 400-500 stores. After a seven-month deployment and rigorous user-evaluation process, it is now being rolled out to their Spain, Russia and the Pan-European markets.

Said Atul Jalan, managing director and CEO, Manthan Systems, " With Astra, McDonald's' managers can translate corporate objectives to measurable actions, monitor and compare performance against benchmarks and take course corrective actions."

Manthan is also engaged in talks with IBM for their go to market plan. "IBM is keen to look at the Indian market," he added.

Manthan Systems is looking at achieving a revenue of $15 million, for the fiscal 2006. Apart from their own financing, the promoters have opted for debt funding from Sidbi.