Cloud-first policy adopted at Coca-Cola

Drinks bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises operates de facto cloud-first policy as it retires its SAP ERP suite - piece by piece

Coca-Cola Enterprises, the company that bottles and distributes the famous beverage in Western Europe and Scandinavia, has adopted a de facto "cloud-first" policy - not just for new enterprise applications, but also for in-house developments.

The organisation has been moving in that direction since 2009 when it first implemented SuccessFactors for human resources management. Since then, it has installed a slew of cloud-based applications, retiring elements of its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as it goes.

The latest to go is SAP customer relationship management (CRM), says Kemal Cetin, vice president of information technology at Coca-Cola Enterprises, replaced by Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud and its Service Cloud, including some third-party apps that run on the Salesforce platform.

"We are using the sales cloud and the service cloud extensively," says Cetin. "But we started with Chatter. That was our first exposure to Salesforce."

Chatter, a group collaboration tool similar to Yammer, was initially implemented as an experiment to see whether some form of corporate social media might prove valuable for team working.

"It was about trying to understand the impact of a Chatter-like tool from an internal communications and employee-engagement perspective," he says.

Instead of promoting it across the organisation, Cetin left it largely to staff to decide whether they wanted to use it.

"In a matter of months, it went from zero to 2,000 people... Now, almost everyone who is not working on the [production] line is on Chatter - that's about 6,000 people," says Cetin.

Chatter was initially used to help coordinate sales activities, but is increasingly being used to support the company's 600-strong force of service technicians, who maintain some 600,000 vending machines and other items of equipment for vending beverages in McDonald's, pubs and across the hospitality sector.

While Chatter-rival Yammer was briefly considered, the decision to implement Chatter was partly intended to test out Salesforce in the enterprise prior to a bigger rollout of Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, as well as some third-party apps, such as Service Max.

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Cloud-first policy adopted at Coca-Cola

Drinks bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises operates de facto cloud-first policy as it retires its SAP ERP suite - piece by piece

"We have been moving towards the cloud quite aggressively over the last three years. We implemented SuccessFactors, before the SAP acquisition. We are in the middle of implementing Ariba for procurement and Taleo on the human resources side.

"We were the biggest user of the Microsoft cloud collaboration suite when it was launched, with email and SharePoint. We also have a couple of applications in finance and treasury, procurement, and transportation.

"So in pretty much every part of the business we are moving into more and more cloud-based solutions, quite aggressively," says Cetin.

The company is also using infrastructure-as-a-service on which to develop bespoke applications, rather than implementing packaged software.

Implementing cloud applications, though, is very different from conventional applications, says Cetin.

"It's a whole different skillset and way of working compared with your typical ERP 'waterfall' type of implementation approach to the whole 'Agile' methodology. That's a change and we are still in the middle of it, and I don't think we have 100 per cent perfected it... It's a continuous evolution," says Cetin.

"A cloud application can be deployed and embedded in a much faster time frame compared to 'old school' applications," says Cetin.

From an operational and financial standpoint, he says, it has cut capital expenditure and drastically reduced the licence management headache.

The push to cloud also helps Coca-Cola in its strategy of billing departments directly for the IT services that they use.

"It's a simple model, in a sense. We know what we are paying for. There's a single number per month, per person or whatever the pricing structure is. It's quite predictable," says Cetin.