Coca-Cola Beverages Africa streamlines its operations with Microsoft solutions

With more than 40 bottling plants and serving over 650,000 retail outlets on the continent, Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the number one Coca-Cola bottler in Africa and the eighth largest globally by revenue. In the wake of major consolidation, which established its operations in 2016, the bottling giant needed seamless digital systems that enabled the business to operate as one. With Microsoft, namely Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Azure, CCBA achieved that goal, reducing its IT costs from 2.85 percent of net sales revenue to just below 1.4 percent of net sales revenue, while enhancing its customer and staff experience in the process.

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“One of our major focuses has been corporate digitization,” begins Joshua Motsuenyane, CIO of CCBA. “This naturally means digitizing across all business areas and, more importantly, digitizing for the customer—creating new routes to market and enhancing existing ones.”

“Because CCBA was born out of a merger of different companies, there were a lot of infrastructure redundancies, supply duplications, and lines of accountability that were blurred. We needed to perfect the overall business’ ability to operate as one,” Motsuenyane continues.

For seamless resource planning, CCBA made the shift to Microsoft solutions including Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365 to upgrade finance operations, improve customer engagement, and drive HR capabilities with strong analytics. “We’re now able to get these different customer engagement, security, and analytics modules all within the same 3-in-1 platform,” says Motsuenyane. “Plus, we embedded Power BI. Before, our BI landscape was very unstable. Since it’s been moved onto the Microsoft Power BI platform, it's stable and performance levels are much improved. We’re getting the same level of visibility as if we were running separate systems on all operational levels, without the ensuing bottlenecks. Turnaround time and decision-making processes are much faster.”

Increased availability, reduced costs

Switching to Microsoft Azure has also helped the team cut costs and ensure availability. “With a reduced application landscape, we've decreased the number of virtual machines we need,” Motsuenyane adds. “We moved our on-premises servers to the cloud so we don't have to worry about maintenance anymore. We do things quicker and can extract maximum value from the investments we have made. Thanks to these synergies, our IT costs have dropped from 2.85 percent of net sales revenue to just below 1.4 percent of net sales revenue.”

Communication at a critical time

The implementation of Microsoft 365 also enabled CCBA to continue operating and communicating seamlessly during COVID-19. “I don't know that we would have survived, had it not been for our modern workplace transformation. Thanks to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Power Apps, which allow us to customize features that facilitate workflows,” details Motsuenyane. “I think our Teams usage rate is about 94 percent on any given day. That’s 94 percent of 11,200 employees, which is very high. We also had about 65 percent usage and adoption of Yammer in its launch month in October 2020.”

“We’re in this partnership for the long haul,” echoes Wendy Thole-Muir, Head of Corporate Communications at CCBA. “Bringing everything together—from so many different markets, with so many different legacy cultures, and different legacy processes—was something we once only dreamed about. We’re hoping this offers a model of transformation for other franchised Coca-Cola bottlers.”