Yum Brands Delivers Fast Food and Content

With 37,000 restaurants in more than 110 countries and territories, more than 1 million associates, and global brands including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, Yum Brands is the world’s largest restaurant company.

With so many stakeholders, learning is no small feat. To ensure consistent, personalized content, including standard operating procedures for the restaurants and e-learning for employees, Yum instituted a learning content management system (LCMS) in 2007.

From how food is prepared to the proper way to greet customers, Yum Brands strives to offer its customers a consistent restaurant experience from store to store. However, with employees frequently joining the team, updates to menu items, changes in food preparation tools and procedures, and regional considerations, maintaining that experience can be a challenge.

To manage brand integrity, each Yum brand maintains operating standards that define how to prepare food, serve meals and operate restaurants. The brands use these standards to support training materials developed and maintained in the LCMS. The standards are also reused to create other training tools, such as training cards, observation checklists and build cards. Housing materials in the LCMS enables the organization to perform two functions key to the success of its training programs: content development and management, and personalized delivery.

To Each Brand Its Own

Each brand has a core set of products, but depending upon geography, that brand also can have regional menu options to cater to local customers, as well as equipment variations. So, instead of all learning being centralized in one location, learning is decentralized within business units.

To maintain the accuracy of the learning content developed and accessible in the LCMS, each business unit creates standard operating procedures (SOPs) to define each restaurant’s procedures and serve as the basis from which all other learning tools are created. SOPs, ranging from how employees should wash their hands to prepping food, are developed through a collaborative process by developers in each business unit.