Taco Bell serves up support

Headnote

The secret ingredients in the fast-food giant's help desk push include problem-tracking solutions, asset management and business savvy

To the uninitiated, the phone number 1-800-SOSTACO may bring to mind a hungry caller suffering from chimichanga withdrawal. But those who have had to dial that number know they can rely on it to put them in touch with Taco Bell's Operations and Systems Help Desks. The solution centers tackle hardware, software and procurement problems for users at corporate facilities and in the firm's 4,000 restaurants.

"The buck stops here," said Peter McGarahan, senior manager of network operations support, Information Technology Group at Taco Bell Corp., Irvine, Calif. McGarahan oversees the Systems Help Desk, which supports non-restaurant personnel. "We provide first- , second- and third-level support. We call our help desk the 'Systems Solution Team' and try to get everybody to be an information consultant rather than a help desk analyst."

The IT management staff at Taco Bell, a subsidiary of PepsiCo Inc., Purchase, N.Y., has coupled state-ofthe-art technology with business know-how and people skills to run what they term "next-generation help desks." According to McGarahan, the tasks covered by both help desks range from support to asset management, to hardware testing and evaluation, to training and standards recommendations. "If you want to run a successful help desk, you need to find out what's underneath your control and what affects your environment," he said.

The company split the help desk functions for internal and restaurant users in March as part of a business reengineering push. McGarahan said the move was made because each segment demanded different help desk expertise. As director of the internal support operation, McGarahan works closely with Jamie Houlihan, director of the restaurant help desk. Houlihan reports to the vice president of operations, while McGarahan reports to a senior director who works for the chief financial officer. Despite the different reporting structure, McGarahan and Houlihan said the two operations work together and use similar systems.

The Operations Help Desk supports a variety of users, including restaurant managers, assistant and shift managers, and crew members. Restaurants are run using TACO (Total Automation of Company Operations), a proprietary back-office system that handles operations like inventory control and labor scheduling.

The TACO application resides on...