Coca-Cola Amatil looks to apps for insights

Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) is developing an application that allows its sales reps to take photos of fridges in a store using a tablet and give in-store staff feedback on product layout to help increase drink sales.

CCA’s Australia CIO, Warwick Hutton, told CIO Australia that the soft drinks giant can’t afford to do “generic layouts” of fridges across all stores in Australia.

“You have to be much more targeted and take into account the demographics,” he said. “A fridge layout needs to be different in a Subway store compared to a newsagent.”

Hutton added that if the store improves drinks sales following the feedback, the sales rep will receive an incentive.

CCA is supplying 1000 sales reps with iPads. While the company doesn’t have a formal bring your own device policy, sales reps can use their personal device to access emails as long as they use mobile device management.

The company also plans to migrate some mobile mail applications into an Azure cloud provided by Microsoft. This will allow its sales reps to access apps while they are on the road visiting customers.

“While CCA has very strong brands, what we are seeing in the marketplace is that there is less brand loyalty from consumers these days. People have far better choice and are better informed,” he said.

“The technology trend for us is to provide employees and customers with real time insight to create customised offers for consumers on the spot.

“What we would like to do is use more real time, pattern matching engines to drive insights.”

Cloud usage

Over the past three years, CCA has focused on a replacement of over 170 legacy systems, ranging from call centre systems to call management and production planning, as part of the Oasis project.

The company migrated off Lotus Notes to Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in 2010. CCA also uses the vendor’s Office 365 and Azure cloud services.

“People can get access to their email off any device wherever they want. Prior to that, we were using a traditional laptop, virtual private network [VPN] system and it was just too hard for staff to get into our system,” Hutton said.

“As we implement the latest version of Office 365 we want to move our users to a Web-based access environment. Between now and May 2014, we aim to have 60 per cent of our users moved across to that Web environment.”

In addition, there are plans to shift the on-premise SharePoint platform into the Azure cloud.

According to Hutton, this will give staff the ability to shift between Office 365, Azure and its internal systems seamlessly.

“We will also have the ability to host applications wherever we like.”

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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