2024 Franz Edelman Award finalist: McDonald’s China

Welcome back to Resoundingly Human, the podcast brought to you by INFORMS, the leading association for professionals and students who apply science, math, technology, and analytics to make smarter decisions for a better world.  I’m your host Ashley Kilgore and thank you for joining me for the next episode in a special series highlighting the 2024 Franz Edelman Award finalist teams!

The Franz Edelman Award is awarded each year to an organization that has made a transformative contribution to society, all with the power of advanced analytics. In the leadup to the 2024 INFORMS Analytics Conference in sunny Orlando this April, we’ll be highlighting the incredible contributions of this year’s finalists. The winner will be announced at the conference, during the Edelman Gala. For the next episode in this year’s Edelman finalist series, I have the pleasure of speaking with the team from McDonald’s China to share some special insight into their finalist project, which accurately forecasted and delivered on record growth in the Chinese market for McDonalds.

China is a big market with a population of 1.4 billion people. If you take the U.S. as an example, in the U.S. McDonalds has around 14,000 stores versus a 330 million population, as you know. So you can see there is big room for China to grow.

Interviewed this episode:

Wendy Wang and Jim Shi

Optimization Analytics Technology (OAT) and McDonald's China

Wendy Wang is the Director of Optimization of Analytics Technology (OAT), which partnered with McDonald’s China for their Edelman finalist project.

Jim Shi is the Vice President of McDonald’s China, responsible for supply chain management.

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