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>> Hi, welcome to another episode in
Real World Customer Stories brought
to you by the Power CAT team.
My name is Pranav Rastogi and I'm
a member of the Power CAT team.
I wanted to introduce Coca-Cola
United and thank them for sharing
their journey with
Microsoft's Robotics
Process Automation solution
in Power Automate.
Coca-Cola United leveraged
Microsoft's RPA solution
to automate a bunch
of legacy processes,
including SAP,
to replace the cartridges
in their freestyle
beverage vending machines.
This allowed them to
save time, resources,
money, and scale globally
as an organization.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
>> Good morning. This is Bob Means.
I'm coming to you from
Birmingham, Alabama.
We're here to talk a little bit
about how Coca-Cola innovation
collided with our supply chain
system and how we got around it,
got it moving again,
using Power Automate RPAs.
Allan McDaniel will be joining me
and we look forward to
sharing this with you.
>> Today, we'll give you an
introduction to Coca-Cola United,
the business opportunity
that we faced,
and the Power Automate RPA solution
that solved that opportunity.
Along with a demo of that solution.
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>>In the global Coca-Cola
system of the 21st century,
Coca-Cola United holds a
notable position as both the
original and the largest privately
owned Coca-Cola bottler.
Beginning in 2014, a national
refranchising of territories in
the Coca-Cola system
returned the business to
its roots of local ownership
and presence in communities.
This gave leading and
well-capitalized bottlers
like Coca-Cola United
an unprecedented opportunity to
expand their franchise territories.
From the legacy footprint the
company served for decades,
it was transformed through
phased acquisitions of
more than 40 additional facilities
and market territories,
establishing an expanded footprint
with presence in seven states.
Some of the Coca-Cola systems
most significant markets are
served by Coca-Cola United.
Chattanooga, home of the world's
first Coca-Cola bottler,
established in 1899, has been part
of Coca-Cola United since 1924.
Atlanta, birthplace of
Coca-Cola and headquarters of
the worldwide Coca-Cola system was
acquired in April of 2017 and,
of course, Birmingham,
the hometown in
headquarters of Coca-Cola
United since 1902.
From fewer than 3,000 associates,
the company now employs
nearly 10,000 people.
Before, it 18 sale centers
and now operates 54.
Customers have more than
tripled to exceed 150,000.
Beverage volume has grown from
59 million cases a year to
more than 200 million cases.
Nearly every facet
of our business has
increased more than
3 and a half times.
Revenues were $775 million when
refranchising started and will
approach $3 billion by 2018.
The stage is set for
a vigorous future on a much
larger scale than ever before.
Coca-Cola United's story will
continue bringing value and
delight to more associates,
customers, consumers, and
communities across the Southeast.
A refreshing story indeed.
>> As you can see, Coca-Cola
United is a leader in
the Coca-Cola system from production
to customer distribution in
virtually every channel.
But recently, we have been provided
an exciting opportunity for
the consumer and our brand
that did not fit into our
optimize supply chain.
This opportunity is called Freestyle,
a hi-tech consumer
delivery capability.
The following video introduces
you to that product.
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>>Coca-Cola Freestyle is
committed to innovation.
The 7100 Series is the
next-generation self-serve
countertop dispenser.
Here is your introduction
to key components that
make this dispenser a
one-of-a-kind experience.
The 7100 series has a more modern
and updated look and feel.
The first thing you'll
notice is the large display.
A 24-inch high-definition
rapid response touchscreen
is perfect for dynamic,
attention-grabbing
promotional materials to
surprise and delight guests
and helps grow beverage sales.
>> As you can see, this innovation is
a strategic brand builder
that engages the consumer.
The problem for United is
the ongoing replenishment of the
high-tech, small flavor cartridges.
It made most sense for us to
outsource the production
and distribution,
which resulted in the following
back office process nightmare.
We take the order traditionally in
our contact center and we take
that for our bottled can
as well as the cartridges.
That's not the problem.
It's the next steps.
We then have to transfer the
information to track it in Excel.
We create a PO to the supplier.
We then translate the
customer numbers and
material numbers to the supplier or
customer numbers and
material numbers.
We create an order in
the supplier system.
Check the e-mail for delivery
from a shipper like UPS.
Check e-mail for the
invoice from the supplier.
Once that's in, then we print
everything out and walk it to AP.
They then scan the documents
back in and send it through OCR,
which then has to be validated and
released to release the
PO and the invoice.
Obviously, this back office process
nightmare is not only costly,
but prevents us from scaling
the strategic local
Freestyle campaign,
thereby blocking the utilization
of the brand building,
differentiating asset
Freestyle in the marketplace.
Now, I'd like to
introduce Allan McDaniel,
who will lead us through the
Power Automate RPA solution.
>> Morning, I'm Allan McDaniel
with Coca-Cola United.
As you can see,
we were faced with a couple
of technological challenges.
One with a legacy
application that was too
costly to create APIs and another,
navigating a third-party website.
Let's see how Power
Automate RPAs helped to
fill these gaps and allowed
us to automate the process.
>>First, I'd like to start off
by introducing our BOT Asa,
or Automated Service Agent.
Our BOT is named after Coca-Cola's
founder, Asa Griggs Candler.
Asa will work 24-7, 365 days a year,
never gets sick and
never take a vacation.
Asa is Cloud-based, allowing it to
auto-scale for any job or
integrate with any application.
Asa is built on the
Azure + Power Platform
and uses Azure Key Vault
to securely connect to
other applications and
also integrates with
Azure DevOps for continuous
integration and continuous deployment.
As you saw previously,
there were a lot of manual
steps involved with ordering,
tracking, and invoicing
in the Freestyle process.
With the help of Asa, the
CRM agent's times spent on
the Freestyle cartridge ordering
process has been greatly reduced.
Instead of completing
these steps manually,
the CRM agent will only enter
the order into the CRM system,
and Asa will do the rest.
Orders are now tracked in a database
and not an Excel spreadsheet.
The RPA reads this database and
creates the purchase order in SAP.
Then the RPA submits
the order information into
the suppliers online system,
validates the order has been
submitted successfully
in that system,
and then it will monitor
the e-mail groups
for the invoice and delivery e-mails,
match those e-mails to the
correct order and store
the attachment in Azure Blob Storage
for future reference if needed.
It then uses AI builder to
extract information from
those e-mail attachments that will
be used in the Account Payable step,
and finally releases the purchase
order and invoices in that AP.
Next, I will show you a short
demo that looks at some of
the code and then the RPA in action.
The demo started out looking at
the Power Automate code with
the built-in connectors.
It looked at the database
to get new orders,
it looked at Azure Key Vault
to get the login information,
and it looked at the UI Flows
that were previously recorded.
Now, we're going to run the flow
to create the purchase order in SAP.
The bot is now logging into SAP
with no manual intervention,
navigating to the transaction
and we'll be getting their
purchase requisition from
a previous order that was
submitted in the CRM system.
Now it's created a purchase order.
It's going to get the
purchase order number and
save it in the database so that
we can use it in the next step.
Now we're going to log on to
the supplier system to
place the order there.
The first thing is we're going
to pick the correct customer,
and then we're going to enter in
the quantities for the product.
Now we've submitted the order,
and now we're going
to go validate that
the order was successfully
submitted in their system.
So we search for the purchase order,
and there it is, with the
status of "Submitted".
Next, we're going to run
the Account Payable flow.
Here, the bot is logging
on to SAP again,
navigating to the transaction,
and then entering some
information from the database.
It's also going to
enter some information,
one of the attachments that
we received in an e-mail.
Now it's saved and
it's going to copy
that document number
and save it back to the database.
So after every step,
there's logging that occurs in
the database to know if
it was successful or not,
and then we have e-mail that
go out in case of any failures
so that someone can follow up
and make sure that the
profits keeps moving.
As you can see, the RPA performs
most of the manual tasks now.
Before the RPA, we had
to keep on ordering
our Freestyle cartridges to a
dedicated Call Center Agent.
Now that the ordering
process has been simplified,
we can allow orders
from all channels.
These includes inbound,
outbound Call Center Agents,
Field Sales Representatives that
visit the customer on-site,
and the Customer Self-service Portal.
The RPA will process orders
from any method of interest.
As you can imagine, by removing
all those manual steps,
we will save a lot of time.
It immediately frees up
the current dedicated Call
Center Agent for other activity.
It also allows us to expand
the local Freestyle campaigns
without the need to hire
more dedicated Call Center
Agents to handle the process.
This could be up to 10 agents
when fully implemented.
With the simplified ordering process,
an order no longer has to
go through the Call Center.
It can now be taken by any
order-taker, including the customer.
Some of the benefits
we saw [inaudible]
on this solution is that since
Power Automate and UI flows it has
low-code to no code platforms,
and has many built-in connectors.
They really reduce development time.
Some of these built-in
connectors that we use,
for example, our SQL Server
for tracking the order
through that process,
Azure Key Vault for
securely retrieving
passwords to Microsoft
Outlook connector
for monitoring e-mail groups,
and really most importantly,
there were no customer connectors
developed or used in this solution.
Another important feature for
us is the integration
with Azure DevOps,
which allows us to integrate not
only the Power Automate solution,
but often any infrastructure
that is needed into one project.
Once built, these UI flows
can be used in other
Power Automate bots.
This will allow us to
extend the value of
any UI flow to possibly solve
other business challenges with
legacy application with
little to normal development.
We're always looking to collaborate
with our fellow North
American Bottlers.
So the ability to integrate
Power Automate into DevOps
allows us to share this work
easily across the organization.
During this process, I developed
a strong partnership with
Happiest Minds and Microsoft.
We engaged Happiest Minds to
architect and develop
this solution and
Microsoft provided the best practices
and resolved any issues that arose.
In the end, we were able to deliver
the best solution to
this business challenge,
thanks for a great collaboration
with Happiest Minds and Microsoft.
>> Wow. So this is
the missing piece of the
Power Automate platform
that enables us to turn
our legacy apps into
modern micro-services.
This will allow us to
automate and digitize
business processes from end-to-end
using Cloud technologies.
Already, while building a solution,
we have resurrected high-value
strategic projects that we could
not tackle due to the
constraints of legacy apps.
We feel empowered to solve
any future opportunities the
business provides to us.
The Coca-Cola United team,
thank you for letting us share
our Power Automate story and the
exciting new UI flow component.
>> This was a
fascinating journey that
the Coca-Cola United team was on.
Thank you again for sharing this with
us and wishing you-all
the best for the future.
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