Petra Burgstaller, who leads the BPM efforts at Coca-Cola, presented on how they are using BPM in the context of an SAP ERP system used at their 250 franchised bottling partner companies worldwide. There are 1.8 billion servings of Coca-Cola beverages consumed each day, in every country except Cuba and North Korea, so having local bottling companies is key to their distribution. The challenge, however, is to establish process best practices, push those best practices out to the independent bottling companies, and continue to innovate on the processes.
They built a “Coke One” template for the core business processes, basically an SAP template with some bolt-ons, and are working to have it adopted by 50% of their worldwide partners to support their 2020 vision of doubling their market. They’re using ARIS to define and document the business processes, then SharePoint for their portal as well as documentation of their SDLC. BPM (or BPA, if you prefer) is used during planning and requirements analysis, then to guide the design and build. They’re using process models – over 1,000 over them – plus a variety of other ARIS capabilities including release cycle management, KPs and performance measures, and publishing that cover the full cycle of process strategy, process design, process implementation and process controlling. Some of the ARIS-SAP synchronization is done manually but they are able to publish some information from ARIS to SAP Solution Manager, effectively isolating the business information and design in ARIS, and the technical design and implementation in SAP.
One key thing is the ability for bottlers in different countries to adopt the processes and the Coke One template for local regulations, although they prefer to keep it as close to the standard as possible to allow changes to processes to flow out from the company to the bottlers. Because Coca-Cola is hosting this for all of their bottlers, it makes it a bit easier to synchronize updates to the standardized processes: if a bottler has made changes, a comparison is done on the models and must be manually reconciled before updating, so that a bottler’s specific changes aren’t lost. They’ve even created a BPM community for sharing ideas and answering questions, allowing them to continue to develop best practices.