Coca-Cola Germany Adds 40-50% to Bottom Line with Help from Salient’s Software Solution

In 2007, Coca-Cola’s operations in Germany were consolidated from eight bottlers into one: Coca-Cola Erfrischungsgetränke AG (CCEAG). The merger left CCEAG responsible for a tremendous overhaul of operations of an internally fragmented environment in a time when a consumer’s path-to-purchase was undergoing a radical digital transformation. They not only needed to create a system of efficiency in order to service its massive amount of customers, but find a new way to connect and engage with shoppers.

Today, CCEAG manages over half a million customers in Germany and is responsible for more than 80 products and 500 SKUs. With 10,000 employees operating out of 7 sales regions with 60 operating locations, each having a direct impact on customers, it was imperative for CCEAG to implement a centralized system that empowered its employees with actionable intelligence to consistently make the best decisions possible and continuously improve operations.

In order to stay relevant in changing times, CCEAG was also in need of a system that allowed them to digitally transform the way they conducted business, just as their consumers were changing the way they shopped. In order to manage this massive amount of data in a way that provided clarity and insight to its entire organization, they turned to Salient Management’s solutions.

After five intense years of looking internally as these eight companies consolidated and merged, CCEAG emerged at the other end of the tunnel to find a world where shopper behavior had dramatically changed. With the boom of smart phones and social media, they quickly recognized that economic power was shifting away from the retailer and into the literal hands of consumers. Information is now available in real-time for shoppers and CCEAG needed a way to better understand their customers in order to integrate into this new digital path-to-purchase.

The answer was to transform the way they themselves did daily business, innovate how customers did business with them, and change how they reached consumers digitally. They embarked on a digital transformation program that allowed them to engage with their consumers through multiple channels while seamlessly servicing their customers. This required an enterprise-wide visibility into their data.

In order to gain insights across the entire organization and make it available to everyone, CCEAG was in need of centralized reporting. About 500 individuals were doing part-time and full-time reporting. Daily sales reports were run and numbers were crunched in Excel, and then shared in various layouts in separate Excel sheets. They began screening each of their sales centers and all function areas to learn how reporting was being done in each location in order to centralize and harmonize them all.

One thing was clear: the data feed was not consistent, and leadership was constantly stuck figuring out how to calibrate the numbers. The process issues caused flaws in the data and reporting, forcing their employees to adjust their numbers each day, week, or month in order to make them work instead of going back to the root cause to fix the issue. “It was a nightmare,” Marcus Franke, Director of Business Transformation at CCEAG said. “It was inefficient, and it was a nightmare.”

They decided to make a fresh start and enable an entirely new corporate culture.

CCEAG implemented Salient’s Margin Minder® to centralize reporting and analytics for all functions and all hierarchy levels. They stopped push reporting through spreadsheets or PDFs and started a 100% self-service practice by empowering employees to interrogate data in order to make the best decision at any point in time using Salient.

“From the CEO to the sales rep, they all have to go into the system to get the data. The truth is in the system,” Franke said. “Salient is our central hub for any commercial analytics.”

They armed their sales force as well as management and executive teams with both mobile and browser-based drillable dashboards for standard and dynamic reporting to give them the capability of deeper interrogation into the data to better understand what was going on below them. Salient’s solutions allowed them to cover the entire suite of reporting needs: static reporting, semi-dynamic reporting, and full dynamic analytics.

CCEAG further segmented their user groups, separating the sales frontline from supporting functions such as sales support. Their entire sales teams were provided with standard mobile dashboards, allowing the salesforce of more than 2,000 users to view their business via iPads in a consistent way across the country. An additional 1,000 users rely on Margin Minder on desktop to optimally execute sales support functions, making it the right tool across their entire commercial operations.

After digitizing and centralizing their analytics, CCEAG was left with the challenge of better coordinating their customers and better reaching consumers.

Salient’s solutions allow them to continuously monitor and improve metrics and execution scores for each location down to the most granular element. CCEAG also leveraged maps of the social and demographic data of each territory they worked in to closely monitor its customers and sales reps in each location.

CCEAG was able to link key account hierarchies with a regionally-driven execution side in order to dive into social demographic data and geographic information and therefore better understand their customers and consumers. The ability to feed up to a million data records into their Salient system on a daily basis has allowed them to gain a clearer understanding of their customers and align management across Germany. By measuring and monitoring every piece of information, from the purity level of a single cooler to the performance of a new product launch, CCEAG is able to create a complete picture of each outlet they operate and continuously improve the outcomes to drive better performance at each one.

Because CCEAG has successfully digitized their operations, their customers are now able to do business with them 24/7. It has also allowed them to implement new services with their customers to connect with shoppers digitally, enabling them to learn more about their consumers and leverage these insights to have a positive impact on their core business and open new revenue streams.

CCEAG has successfully transitioned to an entirely self-service reporting system that empowers their employees with self-sufficiency and the ability to consistently make the best decision possible. With only 5 employees from the technical side and 12 from the business side providing all the information for the entire company on the back-end, they’ve effectively removed the barriers of every employee taking action on data with a 360 degree view of the value in every action.

After implementing Salient’s solutions across the enterprise, CCEAG is now rated the #1 value adding fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) company in Germany. As the top contributor adding additional retail value to the customer, this has greatly improved the relationships with their customers.

“We have a much better relationship now with our customers because they really see that we’re adding value,” Franke said. “And when you add value the discussion is way beyond the pure price.”

Despite working in a highly competitive environment and a within a category that’s slightly declining, CCEAG has attained the highest market share they’ve ever experienced. “We still managed to grow and we do this by increasing market share volume-wise, but also value-wise,” Franke said. This has lead to not only growth in volume, but growth in profit.