Coca-Cola Bottling Company United dispenses streamlined order management with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate

Founded in 1902 and headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United) is one of the largest privately held Coca-Cola bottlers in the United States. Serving about 200,000 customers demands an impressive infrastructure: 5,000 trucks to deliver more than 600 product lines to a full spectrum of consumer channels, from small convenience stores and restaurants to mega-retailers. When Coca-Cola launched its Freestyle product, which depends on cartridges that are delivered to countertop vending machines, its back-office methods couldn’t scale to demand. Coca-Cola United needed a fast, agile process for selling Freestyle. It got the solution it needed with robotic process automation (RPA) in Microsoft Power Automate and with help from Happiest Minds, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network.

Colliding with innovation

In 2014, refranchised Coca-Cola sales territories helped large bottlers like Coca-Cola United expand to a much larger territory. The company more than tripled in size across every metric, including products sold, customer and employee counts, and revenues. Then Coca-Cola introduced a new product that offered an exciting opportunity for bottlers like Coca-Cola United—and a challenge that threatened to hamper the company’s ability to handle sales at scale, especially given its expanded territory. 

Coca-Cola Freestyle is a strategic brand builder—a self-serve dispenser that reimagines single-serving beverage sales. Deployed to fast food chains and other traditional beverage suppliers, the machines offer more than 100 Coca-Cola product choices, from bottled water to Sprite, many in a variety of formulations. But more choice for consumers complicated distribution. “Coca-Cola innovation collided with our supply chain system,” says Bob Means, Director of Business Solutions at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United. “Replenishing the high-tech, small flavor cartridges was best done by outsourcing production, but it created a back-office nightmare.”

Introducing outside suppliers meant adding a way to cross-reference customer and material numbers via a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, giving rise to a complex 11-step process that required a dedicated customer relationship management (CRM) agent to take the order and manually push it through the system, scanning the invoice and walking it to the Accounts Payable department. Supplier, customer, and material numbers had to be cross-referenced with internal numbers in Coca Cola United’s SAP instance, and the order then had to be created in the supplier’s system. Purchase orders (POs) for the cartridges and invoices were exchanged by email. No simple, cost-effective solution with the company’s current technology was available.

A single dedicated CRM agent could service only 50 Freestyle orders, and nearly 50,000 more were waiting. “This back-office nightmare wasn’t only costly,” says Means, “but it prevented us from scaling the strategic local Freestyle campaign—a brand-building, differentiating asset. We overcame the challenge with Microsoft Power Automate RPA.”

Helping every customer with Power Automate RPA

The company faced two challenges as it explored solutions. “It was too costly to create APIs for our legacy applications like SAP and others, and we also had to navigate a third-party website,” explains Allan McDaniel, Manager of Development for BI and Master Data at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United. “We used Power Automate RPA bots to fill these gaps and automate the process.” Desktop flows in Power Automate automate repetitive processes in Windows and web applications—a perfect fit for high-volume but mundane data entry and transfer.

The solution was built by the company’s fusion teams of citizen developers and professional developers and its partner, Happiest Minds Technologies. Coca-Cola United started by synchronizing data between the company’s SAP CRM system and Azure SQL using Azure Data Factory. Happiest Minds added the automation, creating a master automated service agent they’ve dubbed “Asa.” Developed on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power Platform, Asa consists of several bots and uses Azure Key Vault to help secure and control passwords and other sensitive data.

Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps were used to co-ordinate work between Coca-Cola United and Happiest Minds, making it easier to drive continuous improvement and development across the project. These tools also enabled automation of common build and deployment tasks. “Power Platform and Azure DevOps enabled our citizen developers, pro developers and partner to build as a team – and that accelerated the entire development process,” says Means. 

Now, when a CRM agent enters an order into the CRM system, Asa takes it from there and signs in to the company’s SAP system without human intervention. Asa easily accesses orders, which are now tracked in a Microsoft Azure SQL database rather than in an Excel spreadsheet. Asa reads the database and creates a PO in the company’s SAP system. Asa then submits the order to the supplier’s web application, validates successful entry, monitors the email system for invoice and delivery emails, matches them to the correct order, and then stores the attachments in Azure Blob Storage for future reference. After that, Asa uses form processing in AI Builder to extract information from those email attachments that’s necessary to close the process in the Accounts Payable system, and finally, it releases the invoice and PO from SAP. These steps occur with bots within the Asa bot running in unattended mode, a key capability of Power Automate RPA that takes mundane, tedious tasks from humans and shifts them to bots. With RPA unattended mode, everything is fully automated. After deploying the unattended mode in Azure Virtual Machines, Coca-Cola United can now schedule and trigger events that increase end-to-end automation of high-volume tasks—like its suddenly expanded orders for Freestyle. And because Asa is cloud-based, it can automatically scale to any job and interoperate with any application. Just as importantly, Power Platform and Azure provide a rich set of monitoring and alerting capabilities that facilitate debugging.

The new, simplified process frees the dedicated CRM agent, allowing orders from all channels, such as inbound and outbound call center agents, field service sales representatives at customer sites, and via a customer self-service portal.

Free to Grow 

By removing the busywork of order and invoice processing, Coca-Cola United vaulted over the limitations it faced prior to creating its Asa bot. ”We avoided having to hire 10 full-time employees,” says McDaniel. “Better still, the existing CRM agent is now free to work on other projects.” Kaylan Cannon, the company’s Customer Service Manager, is enthusiastic. “We are very excited about this solution,” she says. “It will dramatically reduce labor costs, minimize the various points of error in our current solution, and will allow us to rapidly expand the local Freestyle campaign to better support our customers.”

For McDaniel’s team, Azure DevOps interoperability, with rich enterprise-ready security controls, is the gift that keeps on giving. “The low-code to no-code Power Automate RPA platform with built-in connectors significantly reduces development time,” says McDaniel. “The way that Azure DevOps interoperates with the solution plus the built-in administrative and governance controls in Power Platform is an important feature for us,” he adds. “We connect it not only with the Power Automate solution but also any other infrastructure needed. Once built, we can use a desktop flow in any other Power Automate flows, extending its value to solve other business challenges with legacy applications with little to no further development.” And Azure DevOps boosts collaboration with other bottling companies. “We can easily share this work with other organizations because Power Automate works with Azure DevOps.”

Inspired by the productivity boost they achieved with Power Automate RPA, Means and his team are exploring other parts of the business platform, including Microsoft Dynamics 365. Azure DevOps and reusability and governance controls will make it easier to share solutions with other bottlers, but for now, Coca-Cola United is buoyed by the joint effort between itself, Microsoft, and Happiest Minds that resulted in an optimal solution, and the improvements continue. “While building this solution, we resurrected high-value strategic projects that we couldn’t tackle before because of the constraints of legacy apps,” says Means. “We feel empowered to take advantage of any future opportunities that the business provides us.”