CUSTOMER STORY / MANUFACTURING

Continuous
Refreshment
How The Coca-Cola Company is using advanced
enterprise data warehousing technology and analytics
to streamline complex and high-volume data
Continuous Refreshment / How The Coca-Cola Company is using advanced technology and analytics
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Best For Business. . . . . . . 3
Social Barometer . . . . . . . 3
Big Data Analytics, Big
Possibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Required Business
Process Changes . . . . . . . 4
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Introduction
As the world’s largest non-alcoholic beverage company,
The Coca-Cola Company has a vast information footprint
comprising both online and offline customer, consumer,
market place, social media, manufacturing and distribu-
tion data sets.
Like many global enterprises, Coca-Cola relies on
sophisticated enterprise analytic technologies to harness
the mass of internal information it generates. Solutions
such as Teradata® Data Warehousing, Vision Chain’s
DSR solution and MicroStrategy’s business intelligence
platforms enable the organisation to structure this data
and use it to help make time-sensitive decisions, inform
strategy and anticipate outcomes.
“Coca-Cola has a tremendous volume of internal data,”
says Anthony J. van der Hoek, Director of Business
Growth Drivers in The Coca-Cola Company’s Global
Customer and Commercial Leadership department.
“To make this information relevant and integrated we
standardise data through a series of master data man-
agement (MDM) processes.”
“Invariably, the complexity of MDM coming from custom-
ers and consumers with both disparate structured and
unstructured data is extremely complex. For this reason,
all of our activities are grounded in the business decisions
and value we aim to derive.”
Continuous Refreshment / How The Coca-Cola Company is using advanced technology and analytics
Best For Business
Today’s marketing teams, customer account managers
and store personnel are increasingly facing a growing
requirement to harness and leverage information. This, in
turn, requires the ability to combine data virtually or in data
warehouses with business intelligence analytics to create
flexible insight hubs that can be interrogated according to
the business’ need.
Fortunately, economical data analytics capabilities are now
becoming available, and they have a strong potential to
enable all types of business users to achieve a more holistic
view of the organisations in a way that was not previously
possible when the data was held in disparate departments.
“The Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse solution manages
much of our internal data in North America and has shown
to be particularly strong for managing large, structured data,”
says van der Hoek.
“Now, we are starting to explore the potential use of the
solution for managing the storage and processing of
customer scan data, to create a solution known as Demand
Signal Repository (DSR). As part of this strategy, we are
investigating not only cloud computing but how to co-
ordinate virtualisation strategies as well as distributed and/
or processing approaches such as MapReduce,® to handle
the big data.”
“The Teradata Enterprise Data
Warehouse solution manages much of
our internal data in North America
and has shown to be particularly
strong for managing large, structured
data.”
Anthony J. van der Hoek, Director of Business Growth Drivers
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Different functions within The Coca-Cola Company, such
as supply chain, category management and shopper
marketing all have their own data requirements. For this
reason, a wider roll-out of analytics technologies is now
being planned.
“As we receive more daily data, the technology will be rolled
out to a broader user-group within the organisation includ-
ing the supply chain, as well as customer account teams
and category management,” adds van der Hoek.
“This effective use of information is expected to enable the
business to make more critical time-sensitive decisions, as
well as look back in history more accurately for trending
and strategic optimisation analysis.”
Social Barometer
For global businesses such as The Coca-Cola Company,
the potential to exploit an ever-growing mass of external
big data could unleash a powerful potential strategic
business asset. Yet, for this to be successful, the unstruc-
tured data sets must be harnessed so that the information
is fast to store, fast to recover and most importantly, fast
to analyse.
Watched by a record 111.3 million people, the 2012 US
Super Bowl highlighted the value of data analytics on a
grand scale. Reaction to the all-important advertisements
screened during the break was gauged by a range of differ-
ent survey organisations.
The subsequent evaluation revealed big differences
between the advertisements rated as ‘most remembered’
and ‘best-liked’ and those which achieved the biggest
amount of audience engagement on social media platforms.
“Social media analytics helped to show the real-time buzz
and consumer actions that were playing out within the social
media space,” says van der Hoek. “In this respect, it was a
real-time use of big data that allowed us to understand the
real brand engagement with our consumers.”
 Continuous Refreshment / How The Coca-Cola Company is using advanced technology and analytics
TERADATA.COM
Big Data Analytics, Big
Possibilities
To help it derive maximum potential from the mass of
unstructured data that continues to grow each day, The
Coca-Cola Company has conducted widespread analysis
on the potential value that can be achieved from managing
big data.
Ultimately, this advanced enterprise data warehousing
has the potential to quickly generate a single view of all
multi-channel retail information and convert petabytes of
data into usable information. If successful, this will boost
the organisation’s ability to respond to competitor activity,
market changes and consumer preferences. As van der
Hoek explains:
“Big data means an explosion of both access to and genera-
tion of data by consumers, including everything from loyalty
card data to social media. Our bottling partners also have
sales and shipment data, while retail customers have
transaction scan data, merchandising data and so on.”
“The fact that some retailers charge a fee for this data inevi-
tably limits the subsequent budget available for consumer
packaged goods companies (CPGs) to convert information
into operational analytics for supply chain insights, category
management insights, etc.”
“This effective use of information is
expected to enable the business to make
more critical time-sensitive decisions,
as well as look back in history more
accurately for trending and strategic
optimisation analysis.”
Anthony J. van der Hoek, Director of Business Growth Drivers
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“This is obviously counter to what is hoped for by both the
CPG and the retailer when the data is made available. In
this respect, when data is unrestricted, there are far greater
opportunities for both retailers and CPGs to better under-
stand and optimise product offerings to shoppers.”
Required Business Process
Changes
“We are investing in big data strategies now because of
our belief in the findings of our pilots,” adds van der Hoek.
“Ultimately, all of the analysis that we do will be provided to
help our customers become more efficient and effective
within their stores and assist them in driving their sales and
improving the experience for shoppers and consumers.”
“In effect, this is about ensuring that we have the right prod-
ucts in the right stores at the right time to meet shoppers’
daily and seasonal consumption needs.”
Although optimistic at the potential business benefits that
a comprehensive big data strategy will bring to the organisa-
tion, van der Hoek is well-aware that the process is far from
simple: “The internal expertise required to manage these
very complex data sets and to develop the right strategy for
the organisation takes time to develop; big data is not some-
thing anyone should attempt to manage lightly,” he says.
“Not only must we build the capability to generate the right
information at the right time but we also need to develop
the right business processes and insight expertise required
to drive these insights to the point of action. This will also
mean developing our people so they can manage insights
at the point of making a difference.”
“I believe that it is this essential combination of people,
process and technology change that will be crucial to
everything we do in the future.”