Inkling announced Tuesday that McDonald’s deployed its mobile platform to standardize and streamline restaurant operations across the U.S. and Canada. By eliminating printed paper, PDF, and Word files, Inkling enables the real-time delivery of standard operating procedures to over 14,500 locations. Inkling also announced major platform enhancements to support the use of mobile devices in retail and restaurant environments. The new release includes a dynamic Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) app for store managers that digitizes paper-based processes and procedures. Additional capabilities released today include support for multilingual work environments and richer analytics around store performance.

Today, over 82 percent of employees still use some paper-based job aids to do their work. The remainder rely on static, often out-of-date policy and procedure documents posted on outdated enterprise portals in the cloud. Owners of these mission-critical documents lack data about their use in the workplace, while out-of-date versions continue to circulate, creating operational inconsistency.

Enterprises use Inkling to deliver policies and procedures as continuously updated dynamic documents. These living documents behave more like consumer apps and engage the user with videos, interactive simulations, dynamic forms and checklists. In contrast, Word and PDF files deliver static and passive experiences. Inkling’s authoring platform allows business users to create dynamic documents entirely in HTML5 with no technical know-how.

Today’s release includes the first in a series of apps reflecting common restaurant and retail procedures, including store walks, employee onboarding, health and safety checks, and general store operations. By delivering operational consistency, Inkling’s customers drive exceptional customer experiences. Today’s release also includes additional platform enhancements to better support complex operations across thousands of stores and millions of employees.

Today’s release includes the following new capabilities:

Dynamic Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) App: This all-new app lets retail operations teams create and deploy mission-critical policies and procedures for store managers, like store walks, temperature checks, and other common tasks. The app includes drag-and-drop assembly of elements like store maps, process checklists, and quizzes.

Support for multilingual work environments: Inkling now seamlessly manages multiple languages within the app, allowing end users to access policies, procedures, and training materials in the language of their choice without extra logins, settings changes or downloads.

User- and store-level analytics: Inkling now integrates with off-the-shelf business intelligence (BI) tools like Google Data Studio and Tableau to provide user-by-user and, in the case of retail and restaurants, store-by-store data to drive business performance insights.

Advanced Document Collaboration: Inkling’s built-in document editing environment now supports integrated commenting, editing, and task assignment, including an infinite document revision history stored in the cloud.

Predictive search: Inkling now provides user-level search indexes that give individual users as-you-type suggestions based on your personal document library.

“Inkling is changing the way we enable learning for our restaurant operators and crew members,” says Rob Lauber, chief learning officer at McDonald’s. “By moving our operating content to this platform, we’re eliminating costs, improving the employee experience, and getting valuable data about how we're helping our operators learn and succeed."

McDonald’s is now deploying Inkling to its store operators and their over 750,000 restaurant workers across the U.S. and Canada.

Although the Inkling platform is used by an array of industries, today’s release targets the vast untapped potential of mobile devices in retail and restaurant environments. For the first time, retail operators can centrally develop and deploy operating materials to mobile devices in the field with one-click global updates. Store activity data translates into unique and novel business insights that drive store performance.