Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is the world's largest marketer, producer and distributor of Coca-Cola products. Today, it serves 419 million consumers throughout North America, the US Virgin Islands, other Caribbean islands, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Monaco and the Netherlands. It employs approximately 72 000 people and operates 431 facilities, 55 000 vehicles, and 2.4 million coolers, vending machines and beverage dispensers.
Situation
Coca-Cola Enterprises faces strong competition from other beverage companies and needed a way to work more effectively with its customers and partners. This required innovation and a new way of communicating within the corporation. In 2008, CCE acknowledged that the current communications platforms were no longer enabling the innovation and collaboration required to take it to the next level and compete in an increasingly demanding economic environment.
CCE required a centralised platform on which to promote the company's initiatives. Its messaging was based mainly around e-mail, which was unable to reach its largely mobile workforce. Chairman and CEO John Brock and CIO Esat Sezer agreed that, in order to evolve the company culture and improve customer relationships at CCE, the leadership team needed the ability to communicate with all CCE employees, especially those managing day-to-day operations in the field.
Most of the diverse CCE personnel work in a distributed manner. Employees in manufacturing facilities had limited access to the corporate network. Its mobile customer-facing employees, who are on the frontline making sales and positioning the CCE products in store environments, also lacked convenient access to company e-mail and content. Additionally, CCE needed a way to drive action and information to all employees in its business by role. Current infrastructure did not allow for this, making it difficult to find appropriate content in a timely manner.
Efforts to solve key business challenges across the organisation ran the risk of being fractured and disjointed without effective collaboration tools. The IT department, led by Sezer, was tasked to provide a company-wide intranet, as well as a way for self-managed team sites to be created to foster collaboration and integration across business units. The company had relied largely on e-mail-based communications for years.
Originally published by Microsoft. To read more, click here.
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