The Real Thing?

As a prime representative of what's been called the most valuable brand on earth, Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is also a company of "Bs": more than $21 billion in revenues, 2 billion cases, 42 billion cans and bottles filled, stocked and sold in 2008. CCE owns 80 percent of Coke's U.S. bottling market and a global footprint that includes all of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Monaco.

Some confuse CCE with the Coca-Cola Company, the syrup and concentrate-selling business that is the prime inventor, acquirer and global image-maker of new products. But it is the independent bottlers - CCE being the largest in the world - that perform the heavy lifting of production, distribution, stocking and regional marketing. 

CCE's information challenge is a mix of nuance and scale recognizable in any large manufacturing/merchandising/logistics business: it is to create centralized, well-informed and nimble decision-making based on good metrics, supported by a common platform of technology that can address dynamic markets across a far-flung organization of 72,000 employees. 

2008 was not kind to CCE. While net revenues rose 4 percent, the company reported a $4.4 billion loss as part of an impairment charge attributed to rising materials and transportation costs as well as shifting customer preferences. 

Two Years, Many Lessons 

In 2007, as the technology side of CCE looked for global initiatives focused on standardization and common practices, master data management came up as the first common thread across business processes. It was soon apparent there was a lack of standardization around tools, metrics or the very business process identified, whether across MDM, BI or information management generally.

"We had started with a technology focus, but it was quickly evident that, similar to master data, we really didn't have a consistent process for managing our BI work," says Kemal Cetin, the IT lead for Project Veritas and director of business information services at Coca-Cola Enterprises. "How would we define and govern metrics and distribute reports? How would we manage user segmentation and all the other things you need to do in the BI space? We quickly realized those things were not in place, so we initiated a global program."

The plan for IT is to move from a support-focused to a development-focused organization skilled around CCE's strategic technology platforms, most notably SAP. Even from his IS/IT perch, Cetin knew the real outcome would have to be more productive user experiences. Very simply, he says, "People have been working more with data than they have been working with information."

Across the street in another building on CCE's Atlanta campus, Sheri Bassett-Preston, CCE's VP of financial operations for North America, was pondering the same questions. As the business lead for Project Veritas, named for an ancient goddess of truth, Bassett-Preston was identifying the institutional processes and cultural silos CCE needed to gather. 

"For the last two years, we've been doing that without technology, trying to create cultural change, getting everyone to use the same information in the platforms we had it in. Around the same time we'd caught most of the low-hanging fruit, Kemal approached me with a deadline to get off our older technology. We were at a point where we had taken our work as far as we could go without technology, and it was time for us to come together."

Right Products, Right Shelves 

Just 23 years into existence, CCE is not centrally burdened by the embedded process challenges of older organizations. But leadership changes had brought shifting priorities to a business that had been decisively acquisitive, and the corporate landscape was made of business units resembling a cartel united by common goals but regionally isolated in its information operations.

It began to settle in 2006 when the regime of new CEO John Brock, CFO William Douglas III and CIO Esat Sezer dictated a consolidation strategy around information.

While Douglas is the executive business sponsor of Veritas, Sezer has been especially vocal about CCE's fierce IT ambitions, and in a presentation with Cisco Systems last year, spoke to welding IT to the core business of planning and stocking more than 1 million outlets and 600,000 vending machines on a daily or frequent basis.

"In very simple terms ... we win and lose business every day [based] on how well we replenish products on the shelves of customer outlets ... it is very critical for us to segment our consumers. It is very critical to put the right products on those shelves of those outlets as the consumer needs," said Sezer.