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Coca-Cola European Partners build a single digital workforce

The coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic has caused seis­mic dis­rup­tion to busi­ness­es. The sud­den need to enable vast remote work­ing has caught many off guard, par­tic­u­lar­ly those with lega­cy IT.

Coca-Cola Euro­pean Part­ners (CCEP) is one enter­prise that could have eas­i­ly found itself among those organ­i­sa­tions in reac­tive mode, were it not for its proac­tive approach to build­ing a tru­ly mobile work­force. Formed through the merg­er of three sep­a­rate Coca-Cola bot­tling firms, the com­bined organ­i­sa­tion has made it a pri­or­i­ty to deliv­er a sin­gle uni­fied dig­i­tal work­place for its 23,300 employ­ees across Europe.

Giv­en the wide-scale incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of CCEP’s lega­cy sys­tems and the vast geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ty between the orig­i­nal com­pa­ny plat­forms, includ­ing around nine email sys­tems and twelve col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­forms, the chal­lenge was achiev­ing this vision quick­ly and cost effi­cient­ly. Try­ing to bring every­thing togeth­er involves a huge amount of dupli­ca­tion and com­plex­i­ty, so CCEP had to decide how to sim­pli­fy this and best con­nect its users.

OkTik infographic

“Our orig­i­nal thought was to go green­field, build new and move every­body to it,” says Neil Charl­ton, direc­tor of tech­nol­o­gy solu­tion deliv­ery at CCEP. A com­mon approach among big organ­i­sa­tions, this typ­i­cal­ly involves engag­ing a large con­sul­tan­cy firm that steers towards the adop­tion of stan­dard oper­at­ing mod­els. It didn’t take long, how­ev­er, for Charl­ton and his team to realise this wasn’t the right jour­ney for CCEP.

“The big providers in the indus­try are mov­ing to com­mod­i­ty solu­tions, which works well if you’re will­ing to build a new solu­tion and move every­body,” Charl­ton adds. “But if, like us, you want a hybrid mod­el that gives you sta­bil­i­ty as you inte­grate lega­cy with your new envi­ron­ment and enables users to tran­si­tion through that smooth­ly, then bou­tique con­sul­tan­cies are a bet­ter option. They have the expe­ri­ence to do the inte­gra­tion, deal with the com­plex­i­ty and work through all the chal­lenges.”

This real­i­sa­tion saw CCEP col­lab­o­rate with bou­tique con­sul­tan­cy OKTiK Tech­nol­o­gy to design a dig­i­tal work­place pro­gramme with automa­tion at the heart. OKTiK cre­at­ed solu­tions that con­nect­ed sys­tems with­in CCEP, which many peo­ple thought couldn’t be con­nect­ed, and the speed and pre­dictabil­i­ty pro­vid­ed by the OneTiK Automa­tion Plat­form negat­ed the need for CCEP to bring in large teams of IT peo­ple to migrate users.

This cre­at­ed a foun­da­tion that then allowed CCEP to inte­grate and estab­lish a tran­si­tion path to its new envi­ron­ment, built around Office 365 and Win­dows 10.

OKTiK’s tai­lored approach to meet­ing CCEP’s objec­tives, as opposed to just advo­cat­ing stan­dard oper­at­ing mod­els, is best rep­re­sent­ed through the uni­fied project man­age­ment dash­board it built. Pow­ered by the enor­mous amount of data and intel­li­gence being auto­mat­i­cal­ly col­lect­ed and man­aged from the end-to-end automa­tion process, the dash­board pro­vides a real-time view of what is hap­pen­ing. This enables CCEP stake­hold­ers to stream­line the project, pre­dict issues and resolve chal­lenges prompt­ly.

The pro­gramme has been the sin­gle biggest enabler of remote work­ing for CCEP. Hit­ting the veloc­i­ty of migra­tions at the start of Jan­u­ary meant that by the time a glob­al pan­dem­ic was declared in March, momen­tum was already strong enough to enable a seam­less mobile work­force. Migra­tions grew from zero to 700 users in two weeks and this is now approach­ing 400 a day, which would be impos­si­ble to do man­u­al­ly. Mean­while, Office 365 has enabled its staff to share and secure data more effec­tive­ly.

To deliv­er com­plex change, you need to work effec­tive­ly with third par­ties; OKTik tru­ly inte­grate with us, cre­at­ing a one-team spir­it focused on solu­tions

“With over 23,000 peo­ple to migrate, and all the back-end com­plex­i­ty, we need­ed real-time report­ing to prove it’s work­ing and auto­mat­ed,” says Carl­ton. “The dash­boards allow us to report to the chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer or chief exec­u­tive on the sta­tus of migra­tion in every geog­ra­phy at any time and fix any prob­lems as they occur.

“They are used every day and through the COVID-19 cri­sis have actu­al­ly helped to cre­ate real ener­gy as every­one can see the counter tick­ing up in real time. To deliv­er com­plex change, you need to work effec­tive­ly with third par­ties; OKTik tru­ly inte­grate with us, cre­at­ing a one-team spir­it focused on solu­tions.”

While every large company’s IT envi­ron­ment is dif­fer­ent, OKTiK has devel­oped a con­struct where­by it can go into any organ­i­sa­tion with a proof of con­cept and with­in four weeks enable them to see what they can deliv­er with the full automa­tion plat­form. The con­struct is flex­i­ble enough to adapt to unique envi­ron­ment chal­lenges and, through an evolv­ing part­ner ecosys­tem, its capa­bil­i­ties are extend­ing rapid­ly.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.oktik.net