Discover how MuleSoft’s management with Coca-Cola is a representation of Epidata’s mission. (*)
Within the framework of our search for innovative proposals, and in a constant evolution that seeks to incorporate the best technologies, Epidata sees MuleSOft as a strategic partner to continue its mission of facilitating innovation for companies. In line with innovation, in addition to doing integrations, Epidata is part of a select team of partners that assist in developing projects that evolve this tool.
Context about MuleSoft and Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola strived to deliver innovative customer-focused initiatives. Yet, as IT faced more digital projects, its disjointed architecture made accessing data difficult. They relied on legacy data centers that were challenging to access and connect. To streamline this process, they adopted a cloud-first strategy. IT has focused on self-service access, providing integration templates that its 250+ bottlers can use. This focus has enabled mobile applications for sales teams and a “Smart” Cooler leveraging real-time data. IT has improved the customer experience while cutting delivery timelines from months to weeks.
Introduction
Coca-Cola, selling 1.9 billion global servings a day, wanted to stay at the forefront of innovation both for its retail customers and individual consumers. As demands from the business to roll out new digital initiatives continued to climb, IT found itself struggling to provide access to the necessary data for different lines of business to use for new projects. As more initiatives were planned, IT realized their current architecture was rooted in disjointed data and handcuffed them, causing project backlog to grow, pushing out development deadlines.
The team decided to close out their data centers and adopt a cloud-first strategy, with the hope of introducing self-service and reusable assets to establish a more future-state architecture. They decided on MuleSoft to enable an API-led approach. This has allowed them to decouple their data sources while standardizing on reusable templates that their 250+ bottlers could leverage and customize. They’ve since enabled lines of businesses and bottlers to self-serve and build good portions of projects on their own – thus eliminating bottlenecks by federating the work to where the expertise exists.
IT is now delivering projects routinely in ¼ of the time (12 weeks to 3 weeks) and can onramp a new developer in just 3 weeks (what previously took 2.5 months). The sales team is now equipped with a mobile application that acts as a single point of real-time data to effectively manage their customer relationships. They’ve also developed new IoT projects around creating smart coolers which provide analytics to rapidly enrich and combine structured and unstructured data sets, thus providing better customer experience and analyzing consumer behavior to promote new products and services. All of this is built on MuleSoft’s unified runtime for Hybrid Integrations and APIs on one single platform.
About Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most iconic brands ever, maintains its same mission 125 years later: to “open happiness.” Today there are 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola Company products served every day. Distributing this overwhelming amount of product requires the company to rely on an ecosystem of bottlers and distributors, with over 250 of them operating on 5 continents. Now, Coca-Cola has evolved from the glass bottled beverage it once was to a global brand, with consumers engaging across multiple digital channels which are changing rapidly as technology evolves.
- In order to engage with consumers and keep up with demands, Coca-Cola needed to digitize its process and create new products to interact with customers.
- They needed better data and analytics around customer behavior, for example, IoT enabled coolers to track customer usage, digital dispensers, personalization through digital interaction (Freestyle machines), etc.
- Coca-Cola has embarked on their digital journey to engage customers and connect with them in ways they never have before.
Desired Outcomes
- Engaging retail customers through informed sales teams – needed a single application platform for the sales team to manage effective customer relationship management.
- Launch mobile and dispenser-level digital experiences for consumers.
- Provide analytics to rapidly enrich and combine structured and unstructured data sets of customers, consumers and business processes to provide better customer experience, and analyze consumer behavior to promote new products, promotions and services.
Challenges
- Disjointed data impacted the ability of sales to be responsive to and thrill their retail customers.
- T was unable to keep up with business demand to roll out digital initiatives – mobile, digital dispensers, and IoT within coolers and the fleet.
- Increasing demand for all front-office applications to be mobile-ready.
- The Coca-Cola Company has over 250 bottling partners worldwide, the largest,
- Coca-Cola Bottling Investment Group (BIG) employs over 100,000 people. IT struggled to meet the demands of the business, and rolling out these digital initiatives proved even more difficult with various regional demands.
Solution
- Driving digital transformation internally across central organization: The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) selected MuleSoft as their unified platform for SOA, SaaS and API development. By building reusable common services, APIs and templates, they saw a speed increase of 2X.
- 2014 ($100K ARR)
- Increasing sales productivity with bottlers: Bottling Investment Group (BIG) was the first bottling group to adopt MuleSoft to increase sales productivity. Connecting various backend systems to Salesforce gives the field access to all customer’s (retailers) information on their mobile devices. Bottlers are achieving 2-4X increased speed by going from Webmethods on-prem to MuleSoft Cloud due to reuse and lower maintenance requirements. Piloted first Freestyle machine with connectivity – customer preferences are monitored and uploaded to machines to make the experience more personal.
- 2015 ($1M ARR)
- Internal operational effectiveness
- Connecting Concur, and Salesforce to other internal systems. Also got CloudHub ready for all of Coca-Cola with reusable APIs/templates. Mule in Action:
Story 1: When a Coca-Cola sales associate walks into a retailer to negotiate a quarterly or monthly buy, all the information they need in terms of current inventory, pricing offers, historical buying patterns – anything they need to have an informed discussion with the customer – is readily available on the associates mobile phone or tablet. This is a Coca-Cola Bottler’s digital transformation for improving internal operations.
Story 2: At any dispensing location, when a customer walks up to a Freestyle machine they can choose from hundreds of different dispense options, creating a personal selection, blended in real-time. The customer can interact with the machine based on their previous consumption habits and Coca-Cola learns more about the customer.
Results
- IT:
- 4x faster; Coca-Cola is delivering projects routinely in 3 weeks rather than 12 weeks.
- 3.3x faster to onramp new developers; what used to take 2.5 months, now takes 3 weeks with MuleSoft.
- Almost a year’s worth of man-days saved (336 days) on managing applications; what used to take 18 days to support a new application, now takes 4 days with MuleSoft.
- Business:
- Deliver hybrid integration and APIs on one unified iPaaS: Anypoint Platform
- Launch Common Service Interface Program to build reusable and consistent APIs to be leveraged by the global bottler community.
* Source: adapted from Mulesoft (2022): https://mulesoftpartners.bloomfire.com/
About Epidata
Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.
Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.
Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.
