Putting the fizz into Coca-Cola

Esat Sezer, CIO of Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), the world’s largest bottler of non-alcoholic drinks, talks business, IT transformation and creating value through innovation with CXO’s Satoshi Kuko.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is the biggest marketer, producer and distributor of Cola-Cola products in the world, serving 419 million consumers with 200 different products. CCE, which is 35 percent owned by the Coca-Cola company, recorded revenues of €14 billion in 2008 and boasts 72,000 staff across 430 facilities. More than half this workforce is mobile - truck drivers behind the wheels of 55,000 vehicles and people constantly replenishing 2.4 million coolers, vending machines and drinks dispensers. With such a dispersed global workforce, one of Esat Sezer's most prominent projects has been to unify the workforce by implementing improved communication and collaboration between employees, particularly those managing day-to-day operations, and boosting productivity. The business also needed a centralised platform on which to promote company initiatives and deliver video and audio messages. So CCE partnered with Microsoft to roll out a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) communications platform - a boon for employees in the manufacturing facilities who had limited access to the corporate network and those out in the field who lacked access to the company's email and content. As well as the obvious connectivity benefits, the new software has meant a significant reduction in travel expenses with the use of online meeting tools and collaborative platforms that span time zones and geographies.

Sezer, who has been CCE's CIO since 2006, says the task ahead at the time was huge but in just nine months all 72,000 users were transitioned into the 'cloud' with email and IM. The tech chief has attempted several large-scale corporate initiatives in the past but this SaaS solution produced a "wow factor". "It exceeded my expectations, especially from an ease of use standpoint and speed of adoption of the user community, quite honestly. We have a big mobile workforce that is on the street every day but we had very limited connectivity with this mobile workforce as well as our white-collar workforce. The speed and pace with which we achieved this created a wow factor for me. From the business standpoint, how we came to the conclusion to drive this communication collaboration capability in the cloud was a result of a pretty comprehensive executive communication strategy that we developed." He says CCE has gone from "crawling to walking to running" with Microsoft's solutions.

The project formed part of CCE's three-year plan, initiated in 2006 and spearheaded by Sezer, aimed at the consolidation, simplification and virtualisation of applications and infrastructures. Sezer, who has more than 20 years of global IT experience under his belt, says his unit has been deeply involved in the transformation process. "To get IT into driving our transformation agenda was top of the list for our CEO [John Brock]. As CIO, I drive the technology enablement component of it, together with all the process changes and related business activity changes that come with it. So that requires a lot of internal collaboration within the business functions and IT." Sezer says credit is due to CCE's leadership team for their willingness to embrace the importance of technology in creating improved efficiencies. However, initially it was a "mess" admits Sezer, with people pulling in different directions. That was until a clear strategic roadmap was unveiled, showing where CCE wanted to get to and what it wanted to achieve with the transformation process. For others embarking on a similar exercise, he even recommends appointing a "czar" to oversee the smooth running of complex transformation of the kind CCE has been through.

A shift in balance
Up until the turn of 2007, around 90 percent of the company's internal resources were channelled into maintaining operations, or "keeping the lights on" as Sezer describes it. This figure has now fallen to around 60 percent, which means around 30 percent of the IT department's focus is on implementing business transformation technologies. Sezer provides an example: "Our financial activities and HR services used to be handled by local business units in the countries where we operate. Today, however, they are consolidated in a shared services model that we created for both financial transactional activities and HR activities." Sezer suggests that you can only achieve this consolidation by putting standard processes and systems on a global platform for staff to access. He adds: "Enabling technology capabilities was fundamental to drive that transformational activity in the financials and the HR side of the house, which involves pretty big transformation components for us." He goes on to say:

"Our strategy is primarily explained in a sense that we need to be creating enough resources to fund the growth-related initiatives that differentiate us from our competitors. In other words, we need to create resources through the efficiencies and productivity initiatives and fund our growth-related activities that the business requires."

As CIO, Sezer is constantly having to analyse meaningful metrics in order to decide where to direct resources. He says this is assessed on an individual basis. "You have to look at it scenario by scenario because there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this," he notes. "As I have said, we have a very significant transformation agenda in Coca-Cola Enterprises so there was not much debate here for us to decide to install more communication and better collaboration capabilities. The question was how we were going to do it and how fast could we get there. Obviously the allocation of resources could come into competition with other things, but this did not happen here."

Of course, any change process or adoption of new technologies needs to create value for the business, but it is not always easy to quantify 'value'. CCE's improved communication and collaboration strategy creates obvious and transparent benefits for the business; other projects, however, are more opaque. Every initiative that Sezer is keen to roll out has to pass a rigorous "value management process". "We have to make a solid business case and we apply toll gates to ensure there is a value proposition." He adds: "We engage the business with us, define the value and let the business allocate the resources if they see value."

CCE's business units plough investment into the IT side of the company in order to drive new capabilities and efficiencies. "In other words, they put forward the necessary financial resources to be able to drive those capabilities. They could put those financial resources into something else as opposed to IT, but we work with them very closely to define the value proposition up front and then we allocate the resources accordingly with our business partners." It is envisaged that the SaaS roll out could be used as a launch pad for CCE to embrace Plaform as a Service (PaaS). Sezer explains: "We are looking into this very seriously right now, but it needs to deliver the wow factor, ease of use and accelerated beta deployment that the cloud provides."

New ideas
Like most top tech roles, innovation is an important aspect of Sezer's job. After all, some IT chiefs suggest that the title of CIO should stand for Chief Innovation Officer rather than Chief Information Officer. CCE's CIO points out that an innovative solution has to deliver tangible benefits for any organisation and not just be adopted because it is the latest so-called 'big thing' on the market. "Innovation has to be a differentiator," he acknowledges. "We don't want to innovate for the sake of innovation - we want to put innovative capabilities into place if it differentiates us from our competitors, be it in revenue growth management, selling and customer services, or the supply chain." An example of innovation is in the warehouse where CCE has collaborated with Microsfoft, Cisco, SAP and Datria Systems to guide staff to where to pick up stock for delivery. The Voice Pick system, for instance, has improved accuracy from below 90 percent to almost 100 percent. It has also meant CCE has been able to do away with people to check that the right products are loaded on the right trucks.

Sezer believes the ability to sniff out innovation requires different skill sets and competencies from IT staff. "You have to be really engaged with your business to understand exactly where the differentiation is going to come from. To do this you need to have very business savvy IT people who are talking with the business to understand where the differentiation points are." You also need to keep a firm eye on technology developments too, says Sezer. "You need to be looking at emerging and current technologies to see how you are going to find the shortest, fastest and best way to deliver that differentiated capability." Naturally, this can be pretty complex, he says, because each company has its own technology ecosystem. He adds: "Things like cloud development and Software as a Service require some really good architectural knowledge within your IT organisation. But if your IT organisation is preoccupied with  the maintenance of the business, you cannot build it so your focus needs to shift into differentiated solution development with the right speed of deployment."

In order to be agile enough to be able to improve efficiencies whilst rolling out the right innovative technologies, you need the right staff: the business savvy techies he refers to. While CCE recruits fresh IT talent, Sezer is mindful of the need to strilke a balance between filling positions with both internal and external candidates. "We are very focused on the internal development programme we have in place today, while the amount of investment we are making into our people has never been the level that we had at this stage. The return of that is ten-fold." It translates to quicker operations. "I am now able to bring in those differentiated solutions faster than I used to with the external resources coming in, because the internal institutional knowledge married with the core competencies and strategic technologies is the winning formula at the moment."

In the meantime Sezer and his team are gearing up for the next three-year transformation plan, due to come to a conclusion in 2012. He also has to continue to be agile enough to react to changing consumer habits and their different choices of Coca-Cola products, especially with customers increasingly being urged to ditch sugary drinks for healthier options. On top of this, business can easily be lost if the right products are not sitting on shelves and packed into vending machines in a timely fashion. These are all challenges that this enthusiastic tech aficionado is relishing, because wherever Coca-Cola beverages are, the IT behind the product won't be far behind.

Capitalising on the green agenda

Esat Sezer is a champion of CIOs taking advantage of the "buzz" around green IT to create efficiencies, save money and slash carbon emissions.

"I don't know why we need to make this [green IT] more complicated than what it is, quite honestly. As a CIO, I can relate it to the rules introduced around Sarbanes-Oxley. I think many smart CIOs took advantage of the buzz around this act to drive some of the simplification efforts that they would like to make in their IT back office. Green IT is a similar buzz at the moment, and rightly so. We could, especially at companies like Coca-Cola Enterprises, use it as an opportunity to define our corporate responsibility and sustainability, which is an integral part of our operating framework. We take this very seriously. On the other hand, you can also look into the IT space and drive some of the upgrade processes, virtualisation and data centre consolidation, which reduces your carbon footprint and energy consumption. You can also look to print and fax consolidation, as well as reduce paper use. So you need to use the buzz as a tool to drive efficiency-related activities."