COCA COLA
Coca-Cola Supply
Chain Management Success Story.
When it comes to the
world’s most powerful brands, Coca-Cola is still number one. The iconic
beverage maker, which has dominated the global soft drink market for more than
a century, continued its 12-year reign at the top in 2011, according to
Interbrand’s latest global rankings.
For Coca-Cola,
achievements like this are byproducts of a vision and an operating framework
that is built on excellence. At Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), the exclusive
Coca-Cola bottler for its territories in Western Europe, the company’s goal is
to be the number 1 or strong number 2 choice in every category it competes in.
But on the road to
long-term, sustainable growth, CCE faces similar challenges to many other
manufacturing and logistics businesses. A top priority is replacing dated
systems with a modernized platform across markets to create a cohesive view of
metrics and streamlined processes.
Bottling iconic brands in Europe
CCE is one of the
world’s largest marketers, producers and distributors of Coca-Cola products.
CCE buys concentrate from The Coca-Cola Company and combines it with other
ingredients to create some of the most popular beverages in Belgium, Great
Britain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
In 2010, CCE completed
a significant transaction with The Coca-Cola Company, selling its North
American operations, while retaining its European territories and acquired new
bottling rights for Sweden and Norway.
CCE’s executives
recognized that establishing a uniform IT program across all of its business
units would be critical for expanding CCE’s footprint in Europe.
“It is very important
for us to have a set of consistent standards and processes, so that when we
acquire and integrate new territories into our business we can easily put those
practices in place in a short time,” says Kemal Cetin, vice president of
European deployment at CCE.
Driving regional
expansion with IT
As part of its Genesys
program, CCE set out to deploy a new supply chain management solution at all 17
of its European plants. The new system would replace and automate many of CCE’s
supply chain processes and required new skill sets to ensure the required speed
of deployment.
CCE needed a partner
to help deliver this new SAP-enabled business transformation. This would
involve not only delivering a technology solution, but also training users on
the new processes to ensure the full benefits were realized.
CSC was selected
because it has combined a strong ‘front office’ business transformation and
change management consulting capability with a ‘back office’ technology
delivery capability for CCE since 2008. Prior to Genesys, CSC had already been
supporting CCE’s applications with SAP, including order processing,
manufacturing, financial transactions, human resources, procurement and other
related processes.
“We started Project
Genesys not as an IT project, but as a business transformation project to
enable CCE’s day-to-day business to work in a harmonized way,” says Cetin.
“Since CSC knew our processes, people and solutions, we thought that would
carry over very well into the deployment process, and especially from an
acceleration perspective, because the learning curve would be relatively
short.”
“Beyond that,” Cetin
adds, “CSC has very experienced and capable people from an implementation
perspective. And, we needed to make sure the cost-quality equation worked for
us. CSC met our criteria and satisfied us from that perspective as well.”
Filling a gap between
supply and demand
The Genesys program is
an integrated SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that will replace
CCE’s legacy systems in the processes of “order to cash,” “requisition to
payment,” and “record to report.”
Genesys will allow CCE
to shorten cycle time in these processes and be more productive. It will also
help bring more visibility into the business and improve decision making.
“We are a
shelf-replenishment company, a supply chain company, a sales and customer
services company,” says Esat Sezer, senior vice president and chief information
officer of CCE. “It is very important for us to integrate our manufacturing
plants all the way up to the replenishment of shelves in the retail outlets.
Through the information side of the equation, we are basically tying those two
ends of the business process together: the manufacturing side, which drives the
supply of our product, and the shelf-replenishment side, which drives the
demand part of our product.”
CSC is playing a major
role in expediting the delivery of Genesys across CCE’s operations, allowing
CCE to deploy Genesys at multiple-country locations at a much faster pace than
if CCE had forged ahead alone.
“There are a lot of
technology areas that require some capacity that we might not have or some
technology areas that we might not have the knowledge about,” says Sezer. “So
whenever we have those knowledge gaps, we turn to our strategic partner CSC to
fill in. Whenever an accelerated deployment need arises, we leverage CSC, and
we can generate value much more quickly.”
ERP IN COCA COLA
It is indisputably the beverage icon – Coca-Cola. Alternately known as
Coke, this soft drink has been refreshing the world for over 12 decades. It all
began in 1886, the year the Statue of Liberty was going up in New York Harbor.
In Atlanta, a local pharmacist named John Pemberton came up with a
caramel-colored concoction one afternoon, mixed it with a little carbonated
water, and offered it for sale at five cents a glass. Pemberton's bookkeeper,
Frank Robinson, named the mixture Coca-Cola, and the rest is history.
Recently this big dog of
a brand has been picking up new tricks, as Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), one of
the world’s largest marketers, producers and distributors of Coca-Cola
products, gets ERP.
Committed to staying
number one and continuing their long-term, sustainable growth, CCE has embraced
an ERP solution from CSC, a global provider of business systems. They have set
a new top priority - replacing dated systems with a modernized platform across
markets to create a cohesive view of metrics and processes. This new supply
chain management solution will be deployed at 17 of their European plants.
According to CSC, the new system will replace and automate many of the supply
chain processes.
Project Genesys
The program CCE and CSC
are deploying is called Genesys. It is an integrated SAP enterprise resource
planning (ERP) solution that will replace CCE’s legacy systems,
shortening cycle time,
and increasing productivity. Esat Sezer, senior vice president and chief
information officer of CCE, interviewed on csc.com about why they are adopting
the new ERP, offered, “We are a shelf-replenishment company, a supply chain
company, a sales and customer services company, and it is very important for us
to integrate our manufacturing plants all the way up to the replenishment of
shelves in the retail outlets.”
The acronyms all seem to
be working. With an SAP ERP outsourced to CSC and deployed by CCE, they report
that the results so far have been strong:
- A new supply chain process featuring increased automation.
- Newly acquired operations brought online more quickly.
- Linked supply-and-demand data as a single system.
All this so we can
continue to enjoy the world’s most-favored, caramel-flavored carbonated
concoction – you can call it Coke.
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