The customer
Coke One North America (CONA) is elevating the North American bottling business by equipping local bottlers with state-of-the-art technology solutions for business process optimization. Founded in 2013 when six North American Coca-Cola bottlers came together to form the organization, CONA’s service capabilities and industry expertise promote superior service to its bottlers and their customers while enabling continuous differentiation of the Coca-Cola system in the marketplace.
The challenge
Every day, the Coca-Cola Company ships considerable volumes of beverage bases to its bottlers, who in turn manufacture and deliver large quantities of Coca-Cola products to their customer sites (more than 10,000 deliveries per day). This also means there are a lot of documents to manage to make sure delivery logistics for one of the biggest manufacturing operations in the world operates without a hitch.
From the beginning, CONA recognized that they could streamline processes for bottlers by automating processes in operations, finance and customer care. Leveraging world-class digital solutions would ease high-volume, intensive daily paperwork while enabling bottlers to focus on delivering the best, personalized customer experience to their local customers.
Users accessing documents
Documents captured and stored per week
Solution
Hyland understands what our needs are, and they have been able to make the right design decisions, as well as help guide us the right way, to make sure that the solution overall is the right fit for us.
Visits to bottler sites uncover optimization quick wins
The bottlers are independent legal entities and do not share data, making it essential that solutions could be adopted easily despite varying IT infrastructure standards.
As solutions rolled out across the 12 bottlers, unique challenges emerged. Variations in processes led to differences in productivity and performance, prompting the project team to conduct site visits across operations and production environments.
These insights identified process gaps and opportunities for optimization, resulting in improved outcomes, including a marked increase in invoice throughput.
Low-code solutions for SAP integration
Hyland experts provided guidance in content services delivery from the outset, educating the team on low-code capabilities within the Hyland solution environment. Together, the team identified approaches that met CONA’s needs with minimal SAP development.
“The services team has been great in terms of coming up with quick solutions to meet our needs and being able to deliver them on time," said Hemant Kochhar, CONA's director of application development, BI and mobility.
Automated workflows integrated with SAP, automated indexing and data set lookup, single sign-on (SSO) integration and mobile solutions ensure user can access the documents and data they need. After a four-year implementation, Hyland solutions store more than 2 terabytes of information, processing 5 million documents per month.
Managed services framework service delivery
The CONA solutions’ managed services framework is designed to optimize business processes across bottler enterprises with solutions delivered in a multi-tenant environment. This ensures accessibility and security for the independent bottlers who do not share data.
CONA’s business model includes the hosting of its own IT infrastructure through managed services providers. This requires close collaboration between CONA, Hyland and third-party entities maintaining and continually optimizing the infrastructure environment.
CONA also leverages Hyland resources for system administration and data capture management. Hyland’s staff augmentation and outsourced system administration services ensure daily operations run efficiently while the internal team focuses on strategic initiatives.
Capture solutions for the independent bottlers
Today, CONA captures and stores 1.4 million documents per week as part of their AP and Direct Store Delivery (DSD) solutions, which are tightly integrated with SAP.
The Hyland team designed solutions that bottlers can adopt with a Citrix account and a password.
The CONA solutions use standardized data sets, security keywords, security groups and roles.
Bottlers can scan using their preferred method for scanning following the defined CONA capture standard.
The low-code environment enables rapid rollout of solutions that capitalize on the documents and data stored in SAP and are available from a variety of solutions, including mobile solutions for the bottlers’ workforces.
Aside from the 30,000 users accessing documents real-time in SAP ECC, there are 5,000+ users accessing SAP transactions and documents from Hyland solutions on a daily basis for AP, AR, exception handling and customer support.
The difference
Trusted advisors and true enduring partnership
The “people” part of the CONA and Hyland story is not to be underestimated in its success.
“They understand what our needs are, and they have been able to make the right design decisions, as well as help guide us the right way, to make sure that the solution overall is the right fit for us," Kochhar said.
Willing participation to determine the best path forward: The team is adaptable to pivot strategy depending upon new development, ensuring all decisions are made based on what is in CONA’s best interest — the success of its customers.
Programmatic methods to ensure optimal performance: Regularly scheduled health checks to assess infrastructure and performance, as well as site visits to meet with users of all roles, ensure CONA has a close understanding of challenges and is able to quickly provide solutions.
Continuous feedback loops including executive-level vision and support: Close collaboration among core team members and key stakeholders, including outsourced teams and executives, enable them to move forward rapidly and successfully.
Disclaimer: Customer titles reflect roles at the time of the engagement.