Coca Cola Company Case Study

The coca cola company is the world largest beverage company. With $35.1 billion revenue in 2010. They operate in more than 200 countries and market a portfolio of more than 3500 beverages products including sparkling drinks, waters juices, tea coffees, sport drinks and energy drinks. They began 125 years ago in downtown Atlanta.

Coca Cola Company sells its own beverage and also manufactures and sells concentrates, beverage bases and syrups to bottling operations. Coca Cola Company owns the brands and is responsible for consumer brand marketing initiatives. Coca Cola bottling partners manufacture, package, merchandise and distribute the final branded beverages to the customers and vending partners, who then sell products to consumers. Bottling partners work closely with customers. The operation takes 300 bottling partners worldwide range from international to small, family owned operation the vast majority of which are not owned or controlled by the coca cola company.

The competitive advantage of Coca Cola Company is its brand. The Coca Cola brand is one of the most valuable recognizable brands in the world. However, in recent years there are many threats to the Coca Cola Company. Like the health issue that has implication in obesity, water scarcity, the economic downturn and so on. Moreover, in this environment that customers constantly switch drinks, cokes found its success through collaboration among employees, with consumer and specifically with its bottlers through information Technology.

For internal collaboration they used Content Manager, Lotus® Notes® and Lotus Domino™ to build a digital library of its advertising archives. They also implemented "common Innovation Framework". The goal of this system is give ability to search and reapply the concept of successful product to the marketers and developers throughout global enterprises. for example, one business unit look for product ideas by searching beverage or brand concepts that worked well in other countries. For instance, Japan is considered as highly fickle consumers who gets bore so quickly. Coke Zero is an example of the Innovation Framework in action that helped development team in finance, legal, marketing or R&D in US and Europe to see what was popular in Japan and then they could share that workflow and product development insights with those regions who wants to launch the product.

Beside its internal communication system, they are improving communication and collaboration particularly with its bottler, which is critical for their overall success. The relationship between bottler and Coke company is very important for the financial well being of the company, having more streamlines supply chain and efficient distribution of products. Therefore, they are implementing "Coke One bottlers model" to standardize they way Coke communicate with its bottlers. This system based on version 6 of SAP's ERP software, delivered