Coca-Cola Vietnam automates sales, purchasing, and distribution processes with Power Platform

With three bottling plants serving over 550,000 retail outlets, Coca-Cola Vietnam is one of the leading beverage companies in Vietnam and one of the fastest growing bottlers in the Coca-Cola global network. Rahul Shinde, Vice President & CIO of Coca-Cola Vietnam, sums up the company’s ambitious digital strategy in a single sentence: “Our vision is to become the most digital consumer packaged goods company in Vietnam, and that means having world-class execution in terms of realizing business value through digital initiatives.”

When Shinde and his colleagues were deciding on how best to implement the company’s new digital strategy, they chose Power Platform to help advance their goals. “When we were evaluating various technologies for process automation, Microsoft Power Platform came out on top,” says Shinde. As the company was already invested in other Microsoft technology, including Microsoft 365, a unified platform made sense. “We were focused on adopting a platform strategy to keep our landscape consistent and reduce integrations,” he adds. “Also, Power Platform is secured with Azure cloud security, which was a big part of the decision-making criteria.” 

The platform’s ability to easily interoperate with tools like Microsoft Teams was another stand-out feature for Shinde. “The beauty of this unified architecture is it all loops back to a multi-modal user interface which is very easy to use. You can raise a request in email, process it in Teams and Power Automate, and use Power BI to visualize the data,” he says. 

Employees can also use the Power Platform tools from within the apps they are already familiar with, helping democratize data and empowering employees across the organization. “These tools are easy to deploy and help us scale automation capabilities faster,” says Shinde. “Power Automate provides us with an extremely intuitive interface that was easy for our users to learn, helping us to propagate a digital culture across the organization.” 

Automating the purchasing process with Power Automate 

To make the team’s strategy a reality, Shinde has been working to help foster a culture of data democratization and process automation. Take, for example, the process of gathering and imputing purchase orders from customers. That’s one area that Coca-Cola Vietnam transformed from manual to automated using Power Platform. In the past, 15 dedicated salespeople fielded calls from customers, placed orders, and updated information in SAP manually. Paper contracts were signed and sent to customers, causing inefficiencies and a lack of visibility that could lead to discrepancies between available product and what was ordered. “It was not always a happy experience for customers and required a lot of back-end office work to manage,” says Shinde. 

The new system automates many of these processes. 

For example, purchase requests (PRs) made in a Power Apps application are automatically entered in the company’s SAP ERP system. This connection, including log in, is made possible using Pro-code RPA with SAP GUI in Power Automate Desktop. The system checks PRs for errors (such as an incorrect accounting code) and those that need correcting are tagged for review by a PR associate who makes corrections via another Power Apps application. Once a PR is corrected, an email is sent requesting approval, and the approval triggers another flow that automates creation of the PO. A desktop flow recently added to the system can even check for POs that don’t require approval and create the PO instantly. The final PO number is sent to Dataverse. 

Automating with Power Automate has helped Coca-Cola Vietnam reduce complexity and save valuable time. Time employees can now spend helping improve customer service, optimizing the time it takes to deliver on SLAs, or winning new business. “We have reduced the time it takes to complete the sales process from hours to near-real time by using Power Automate,” says Shinde. “Today, the business has successfully automated 85 percent of purchase and sales orders with Power Automate.”

Improving delivery performance and visibility

Coca-Cola Vietnam is also using Power Automate to help streamline warehouse operations. In the past, when material moved from processing facilities to warehouses or ready to be delivered to customers, each movement was recorded in multiple paper forms. The paper-based manual processes created bottlenecks in meeting customer delivery KPIs, with customers often expecting shipments to arrive within 24 hours. “Today, we use Power Automate to digitize this process and improve our delivery performance along with traceability and compliance,” says Shinde. 

It’s a perfect example of how Coca-Cola Vietnam has tailored its digital strategy to customers and employees alike, helping improve customer experiences and eliminating ordinary tasks for employees on the ground. “People used to be stretched just to make these transactions happen,” says Shinde. “Now, the overall conversation has shifted to improve customer service rather than just completing mundane tasks.” 

Reducing approval times from days to minutes with Power Apps

Today, even a seemingly simple process like deciding where to place a Coca-Cola cooler has been transformed as part of the organization’s new digital strategy. One hundred thousand of these distinctive, branded refrigerators can be found across Vietnam. Choosing where to place them and securing approval used to be a time-consuming, manual process. “Typically, placing a cooler in a new location requires four levels of paper-based approval along with collecting the customer’s confidential documents such as ID cards,” explains Shinde. Coca-Cola Vietnam employees even used couriers to deliver paper approval forms back and forth. In total, the process could take days. The result was time lost and a lack of visibility into where coolers were currently placed—a few days lag time that could create major discrepancies.  

In keeping with Coca-Cola Vietnam’s digital strategy, the company now uses Power Platform to streamline the process. Shinde explains: “We created a Power Apps application that lives in Microsoft Teams. There, employees can request approvals and attach images. The updates are automatically added to SAP and the entire process is secured with Azure cloud security to ensure data privacy.” As a result, the approval process that used to take days has been reduced to mere minutes. “It’s a huge productivity improvement and gives us more visibility into where our assets are,” says Shinde. The company also plans to expand the tool with other capabilities such as photo recognition and digital signatures. 

A dedicated workforce advances automation to new business areas

As part of the ongoing effort to deliver digital initiatives, Coca-Cola Vietnam has created a network of digital champions to help spread the word about new technologies to every area of the business. “In just six months, our digital champions created 60 automated processes using Power Automate to digitize previously manual workflows,” says Shinde. “There has been huge demand to use these technologies and the digital champions act as our ambassadors and help us scale the technology so more people can benefit.” 

The activities of the digital champions are an indication of how Shinde envisions the future of technology at Coca-Cola Vietnam. “What we really want to see is that digital is no longer just a service that the IT function provides, but it becomes a core strategic enabler for the organization.” Already, areas of the business that didn’t previously use automation or data visualization tools are realizing the benefits, such as the HR function. “It’s great to see new areas of the business embrace the Power Platform for their own needs,” says Shinde. “Our HR team uses the tools to identify top performers in the company and offer employees the best opportunities for them.” 

Already, Coca-Cola Vietnam has accomplished many of its digitization goals with the help of Power Platform. “We have greatly benefited from the efficiency, transparency and traceability in digitizing multiple processes—sometimes from hours to near-real time—by using Power Automate," said Shinde. In the future, Shinde hopes to help empower salespeople in the field with real-time data surfaced through Power BI. “Whether it’s creating business workflows, low-code apps, or giving employees access to data to help them make the right decisions in the field, we are supporting our efforts to democratize these capabilities with the Power Platform,” concludes Shinde. 

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