Flexibility and innovation underlie the current successes of G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers. The company realized significant benefits right after launching several Microsoft solutions in 2016, including Azure and Microsoft 365. It began creating apps with Microsoft Power Platform two years later, equipping nearly 900 field personnel with an efficiency-enhancing mobile app that saved the company USD500,000 in the first year, and the company isn’t stopping there. The ideas—and the savings ($1.5 million so far)—just keep on getting bigger.
August 03, 2020
G&J Pepsi pours in-house expertise into perfect apps with low-code Power Apps driven by Power Automate
“We’re amazed at how quickly we can put things together with Microsoft Power Platform. And we’re in control of our own destiny using a low-code solution to create professional, user-first apps.”
Dan Foster, Director of Digital Technology, G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers
Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers is almost a century old, and it’s the largest family-owned and independently operated Pepsi franchise bottler in the United States. It drives success through ongoing innovation, and building on its early Microsoft Power Apps wins, it’s pushed forward, adding team members from around the company to create a uniquely qualified app development team. With more than 100 critical workflows driven by Power Automate, G&J Pepsi is achieving not just rapidly growing cost savings—it’s driving efficiencies that inspire teams to create even better processes and ensuring that they have the time to bring those ideas to fruition.
Refusing to rest on laurels
G&J Pepsi began its journey with Power BI. That led to a fuller exploration of Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI.
The seven-person IT team at G&J Pepsi, which launched many of the company’s early apps in 2018, was made up of experts in their respective IT areas, but none had any kind of development experience. Yet when the company needed a better way to track the store audits that the field delivery staff generates, the team stepped up, creating its Store Audit app with Power Apps, which saved the company an estimated $100,000 in outside development costs. Technicians in the field use this app to record data about product displays and inventory, submitting it to Power BI to provide real-time data for management reporting. Power Automate triggers alerts to relevant teams so that they can resolve issues right away. As other cost and opportunity savings mounted—sales made when the opportunity was right, licensing fee avoidance for expensive, specialized applications—so did employee satisfaction.
Significant as those gains were, the success of that early app was much more than an efficiency improvement—it opened up a new world.
Building a niche app, at a cost that pencils out
“We’re amazed at how quickly we can put things together with Microsoft Power Platform,” says Dan Foster, Director of Digital Technology at G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers. “And we’re in control of our own destiny using a low-code solution to create professional, user-first apps.” In June 2019, his team was tasked with reimagining the budgeting process in advance of the year’s end. Sales budgeting was time-consuming, inaccurate, and not easily rolled up into the company’s financial reporting. “It was a disaster,” says Foster. His team’s mission was to turn the situation around. There wasn’t time to deploy a complex off-the-shelf solution. “One of our team members wrote the code in Power Apps, collaborating with the DevOps team to connect the data to our data warehouse,” he recounts. “It took just two and a half months. We couldn’t have bought and stood up an outside developer’s application in that time.”
The beauty of Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps and Power Automate) is in its low-code efficiency, says Eric McKinney, Enterprise Business Systems Manager at G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers, and that approachability translates into more capacity for his team. Automating processes with Power Automate not only cuts down on busywork for his and other teams, it ensures that critical information is instantly and accurately routed. “We always have a host of other initiatives around collaboration, cybersecurity, and networks,” McKinney explains. “We can focus on all those things while also building applications with Power Apps and Power Automate, and we don’t have to rely on outside consultants or developers.” He points to a service that the company used to remind employees about the twice-yearly time changes and rare inclement weather warnings. “We weren’t getting much value out of a $15,000 per year service, and one of our team members built an app with much more functionality and flexibility that eliminated that subscription cost.”
Figure 1. Screenshot of store-specific details in the Cold Space Allocator app
Drawing on a rich web of connected Microsoft solutions
Foster and McKinney are expanding the team with in-house talent from diverse areas. “We’ve increased our department in net size, but the company didn’t hire new people,” says McKinney. “By bringing in motivated people who were experts in other areas, we can capitalize on the low-code nature of Microsoft Power Platform and increase the value they bring.”
Foster’s strategy places the big picture at the forefront. He doesn’t evaluate solutions in isolation or prioritize one or two best-in-class features over how the solution fits within the existing architecture. “By choosing integration over other considerations, we’ve achieved massive gains,” he says. Since introducing Microsoft Power Platform, the company has saved more than $1.5 million in lower development costs, compliance penalty avoidance, and optimal resource use.
The company’s IT team continues to develop apps that require modest staff resources but pay big dividends when the scope of the apps doesn’t justify hiring an outside developer to create them. G&J Pepsi’s IT staff can create company-branded niche apps that are designed around users’ needs, saving development costs and shortcutting development time for wins on every front. Another notable IT team standout is its Cold Space Allocator app, which combines sales history, demographic information, and comparative warehouse data to determine the best product mix for a given store. When a salesperson enters the cold storage space availability and the configuration of a given store, the app returns the optimal product mix and quantities.
Figure 2. Screenshot of product layout details in the Cold Space Allocator app
Driving processes seamlessly with Power Automate
Some of the company’s use cases are simpler and faster to develop but still return significant value, like the Parking Lot app, which was created to solve a seemingly small but costly problem. When G&J Pepsi unveiled a new facility with an enormous parking lot and new product delivery procedures, drivers lost time every day finding their assigned vehicles. Now, a text message to their mobile devices from the app guides them to the right spot. “Our Parking Lot app truly showcases the value of Microsoft Power Platform,” says Foster. “Paying an outside developer to create it wouldn’t be cost-effective. But a member of our team created it in less than a day, lowering our total delivery cost and saving every driver frustration and 20 to 30 minutes of wasted time daily. Power Apps saved the day.”
Foster’s team used Power Apps and Power Automate for tracking and for sending alerts. The team also uses Power Automate to pull data from G&J Pepsi’s mobile carrier, automatically texting workers their data usage and cutting that expense by almost half. That app was created by a single developer in about two days. According to Foster, the bulk of the work was in collecting and ensuring that the correct data went to the designated user. “We used a very simple Power Automate flow combined with our mobile carrier billing exports to automatically text our people with their data usage,” he says. “It instantly cut our data overages by at least $5,000 a month.”
Foster and McKinney found myriad ways to put Power Automate to work throughout G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers. IT teams built a system that creates support tickets from emails, transferring the relevant information to a SharePoint record and routing it to the responsible team. “You might think, ‘Oh well, there’s an out-of-the-box system for that sort of thing,’” says McKinney. “But we built it for ourselves, customized to our own processes, and without an additional licensing cost.”
His team also created an HR system to onboard new employees, saving significant time for the G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers Talent Acquisition team in that department. All of the previously manual functions to onboard new hires—entering the person’s data into Azure SQL Database, requesting approvals for the hire, adding them to the relevant IT and accounting systems, possibly issuing a company credit card, and other actions based on role—now unfold seamlessly with Power Automate.
“This has been a tremendous win for us, but mostly for the Talent Acquisition team and the company overall,” says McKinney. “It not only helps us set up IT accounts for our new hires—it automatically routes all the material to them that they need to get the best start at G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers and be successful.”
Those are just a few of many examples of the successes created by the synergy between Power Apps and Power Automate so creatively wielded by his and Foster’s teams. “We’re leveraging Power Automate to help our business in incredible ways,” adds McKinney. “It’s a great tool.”
Figure 3. Parking Lot app screenshot
Taking technology further for future-readiness
G&J Pepsi continues to explore how information technology can help both the company and its customers. With about $1.5 million in savings to date and growing, the company continues to find more opportunities for streamlining. It recently began an initiative to use AutoML, automated machine learning technologies within Azure Machine Learning, to help its customers determine the optimal product mix based on data, circumventing a time-consuming manual process. “It takes as long for a sales member to place an order for a small neighborhood store as it does for a huge discount warehouse,” says McKinney. “We want to use AutoML to get more accurate orders and save time for our workers and our customers.”
G&J Pepsi’s IT team is also completing a Microsoft Teams rollout, enabling remote work as the United States responds to COVID-19. “We feel like this is going to take everything to the next level when we migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365,” says Foster. “We continue to move workloads into this connected platform, tapping the value of that integration.”
Find out more about G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
“We always have a host of other initiatives around collaboration, cybersecurity, and networks. We can focus on all those things while also building applications with Power Apps and Power Automate, and we don’t have to rely on outside consultants or developers.”
Eric McKinney, Enterprise Business Systems Manager, G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers
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