About coca-cola Coca-Cola Company is the worlds largest beverage company.

They sell four out of five of the worlds top soft-drink brands, in almost 200 countries in the world. More than one billion servings of their products are consumed each day. Problems faced Due to the size of Coca-Cola, maintaining the finances and logistics of their global enterprises is a daunting, yet crucial task. Coca Cola started out with using the old repository and processes system called the legacy system which turned out to be very inefficient. The system was not user-friendly and generated high costs. Financial plans were made on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets requiring manual re-entry of available information. Spreadsheets were submitted as hard copies. This meant that it was difficult to consolidate and update information. This became a key issue as Coca-Cola continued to expand globally, which made efficient and concise sharing of information even more crucial to their success. Therefore, Coca-Cola has the need for IT that goes far beyond individual finance processes. It requires an integrated business management system to handle the different aspects of their worldwide corporation. As mentioned before, CocaCola started off using the legacy system like many other old companies. Soon, they realized that to sustain their ever growing business, they would have to find a more integrated system to manage their global processes. Because of the global expansion of the company, Coca-Cola decided to incorporate SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) and implemented mySAP financials into their business in order to handle the financial processes of the corporation. SEM created a single environment to make financial data accessible to management across the globe (2). MySAP financials are tightly integrated with other SAP systems. SEM provides Business Planning Simulation for finances, Data Warehousing for information collection and data analysis, and can also generate financial reports and monthly sales forecasts (2). MySAP financials has allowed Coca-Cola to consolidate business and planning, and the data warehousing insures that all financial records can be kept without taking up valuable space on company hard drives. This IT is fully implemented in the companys headquarters, and every field location is equipped with intranet capabilities so that information can be given to and looked up from the centralized site (2). Data is organized so that intercompany transactions are eliminated and other adjustments can be made so that the information can then be consolidated to draft financial reports. This system is especially helpful at the end of the month when Coca-Cola is able to consolidate information needed for monthly reports quickly. All of this data provides baseline information so that Coke can track the financial health and growth of the company. In addition to mySAP financials, Coca-Cola uses mySAP BI as a common repository for every location worldwide (2). Another issue Coca-Cola faces, due to their global expansion, is managing their diverse group of worldwide suppliers. CocaColas business strategy is Think local, act local, which requires them to implement an IT system that takes into account all of their local bottlers in the world (.4). The integration between the local bottlers and delivery to the customers is crucial to the companys overall efficiency and keeping the customers satisfied. Direct Store Delivery (DSD), full-service vending and equipment services are key components of bottlers business operations and profit centers. Direct Store Delivery (DSD) utilizes real-time information to maximize efficiency. DSD allows specific sites to transmit customer information to distributors. With the specific data this information creates, DSD helps improve delivery productivity and reduce cost (1). By improving the specificity of shipments, individual stores will reduce unsold inventory and maximize profits. DSD tightly integrates the IT systems of the bottlers and delivery personell with the on-site requests. These requests can come from any variety of mobile devices, field sales representatives, and service staff (1). With this integration, stores can more easily respond to their comprehensive range of customer requests. Therefore, with the mySAP SCM system, advanced distribution models can be built to make the processes more efficient and comprehensive. The following video discusses some of this vending equipment as well as how they have tried to make delivery patterns and overall SCM system more efficient. RFID based bottle dispensers give real time feedback that benefits research, product development, and marketing (6). This technology crosses functional company lines and allows them to deal with wants of the customers in a more timely manner.