The Coca-Cola Company

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most recognisable and valuable brands, with a rich history and a presence in over 200 countries worldwide. 

In most of these markets, The Coca-Cola Company operates a franchise model, licensing the manufacturing, sale and distribution of Coca-Cola’s 50+ brands of beverage and food products to a network of regional bottlers who are entrusted with nurturing the brand and growing the business in their respective territories.

Each regional bottler relies on a team of highly-trained sales representatives, who are the primary interface with Coca-Cola’s globally diverse range of customers, including supermarkets, cafés, restaurants, bars and convenience stores.

Coca-Cola sales are the lifeblood of the organisation

It’s critical that sales representatives are armed 24/7 with the most up-to-date information about their customers – such as stock levels and performance metrics – as well as the latest merchandising opportunities, offers, and promotions.

Chief Information and Integrated Services Officer at The Coca-Cola Company, Barry Simpson, says: “In recent years, technology has played an increasingly important role in enabling the success of our global sales team, and Smudge has been a key partner on that journey.”

From the Asia Pacific region to the world

In 2014, Smudge started creating sales force automation (SFA) tools for Coca-Cola Amatil, the largest bottler in the Asia Pacific region. Those tools have since been rolled out across Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia, enabling Coca-Cola Amatil to revolutionise their sales process.

In 2019 we began working with The Coca-Cola Company on a next-generation sales force automation tool that could be used by any bottler, anywhere in the world. That solution became known as PACE, an acronym for one of the key goals of the project: profit acceleration with consistent execution.

PACE was a collaboration with Coca Cola’s Bottling Investments Group (BIG), 19 bottlers wholly owned by the Coca-Cola Company, spread across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. These bottling businesses were held as exemplars to regional bottler franchises, in terms of how they worked with their parent company and the technology they used.

Empowering sales teams to think more strategically

PACE was part of a larger initiative designed to drive growth by empowering the Bottling Investments Group’s sales teams to think and act more strategically.

When sales reps have intuitive sales tools, they’re able to move from taking orders to front-footing opportunities. Sales reps are enabled to work more consultatively and collaboratively with customers. Long-term, the cultural impact of this approach drives significant benefits for the business.

5,000 sales reps servicing over a million Coca-Cola customers

Building PACE with the Bottling Investments Group gave us the opportunity to roll out the tool across a diverse range of markets, starting with Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam. In these four markets alone, BIG has over 5,000 sales reps servicing more than a million Coca-Cola customers.

PACE is a holistic SFA solution with three distinct elements: an Android app for the field sales force, a web-based admin tool for pushing content to the mobile devices, and a cloud-native middleware layer. Designing and building the entire solution from the ground up enabled Smudge to streamline development and project management and move at pace.

Flexibility to meet the conditions of each market

Every bottler in the Coca-Cola ecosystem is unique. Each has its own culture, its own business goals, and its own technical infrastructure that has evolved over time based on the needs and conditions of the market.

We determined early that PACE would need to provide individual bottlers with the flexibility to adapt the solution based on their unique conditions. For example, bottlers have region-specific loyalty schemes and custom integrations with local vendor systems.

Before writing a single line of code, the team at Smudge visited the five markets earmarked for the initial rollout to observe how the sales representatives live and work. Our goal was to establish differences and similarities between markets – including roles and responsibilities within the sales teams – and better understand the nuances of regional go-to-market strategies, such as sub-contracting arrangements with distributors and logistics/ fulfilment vendors.

Each bottler has sovereignty over their own sales solution

To help provide the required flexibility and modularity, we designed a microservices architecture based on Microsoft Azure cloud services. This decoupled architecture enables every bottler in the ecosystem to host a separate instance of the solution, while allowing for adaptations to meet specific regional requirements, including custom functionality and integration with a diverse set of existing third-party systems.

The use of serverless platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies for compute, database, storage and messaging gives each bottler sovereignty over their own environment, so they can control their own data and make changes to the environment as their needs change. Regional bottlers can also support the system locally, using their preferred support partners in their local time zone.

Scalability doesn’t mean one size fits all

We used APIs built using industry-standard conventions to integrate the middleware layer with existing legacy systems and new systems and applications as they are brought online. This intrinsically interoperable architecture allows for seamless customisations without compromising integrity, enabling individual bottlers to develop capability locally while benefiting from global best practice design and technical work. 

Furthermore, since each bottler is billed for cloud services based on a consumption model, the solution is financially viable for franchises with a large number of end users as well as smaller ones with fewer reps in the field. 

Barry sums the PACE project up neatly: “In record time, we’ve gone from idea to implementation. And this is the start of the journey. We’re not finished yet, we’re going to iterate and we’re going to get better. It’s been an awesome outcome”.

Empower your sales teams with the tools they need

If you’d like to empower your sales team with the data they need to sell in amore consultative, collaborative way, talk to us. We’d love to help.