Coca-Cola Bottling Company empowers the business with Tableau Mobile dashboards to benefit bottom line

The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company, with over 500 brands and 3,900 products. Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated (CCBCC) is Coca-Cola’s largest independent bottling partner. With Tableau, CCBCC’s IT and business intelligence teams replaced a daily 45-minute manual reporting process.

Today, teams can understand metrics like delivery operations, budget and profitability with a few clicks, consolidating data from hundreds of disparate sources. As a result, sales teams can now access mobile dashboards on iPads in the field, increasing timeliness to sell more product. And now, executive reports automatically refresh in Tableau Server on a daily basis, driving strategic decision-making.

Coca-Cola Bottling Company’s (CCBCC) business intelligence team handles reporting for all sales and delivery operations. Shawn Crenshaw, Senior Business Analyst, explains how the team answers questions such as: “Are we delivering product at the time we say we're going to deliver it? Are we meeting that budget? And how well are we doing against that forecast budget?”

Previously, the team spent a majority of their time building reports. It could take days to bring together up to 200 million lines of data from 100 different systems into a data warehouse to then build a portion of one usable dashboard. “We were using a Pinto for our data and we needed a Mercedes”, says Kevin King, Director of Reporting and Analytics.

Kevin recalls coming into the office at 7:30 in the morning, seven days a week to refresh the company’s daily sales report, which took about 45 minutes. And the final dashboard had up to ten tabs that leadership had to click through to see any granularity in the data.

When CCBCC adopted Tableau as its analytics platform, teams completely streamlined their processes. For the daily sales report, Kevin set up automatic refreshes in Tableau Server so data updates every day at 5:30 a.m. Leadership can access current numbers every morning, drill down to the lowest level of data, and Kevin and his team can spend their mornings on more productive tasks.

The new enterprise-wide analytics strategy serves the needs of various audiences and roles.

For example, leadership dashboards focus on strategy, business growth and profitability. Management dashboards – targeted at area sales managers, supervisors, etc. – assist with coaching, training and employee development. Managers can see high-level overviews of each area or drill down into employee-level data. Field sales dashboards allow sales teams to see a full overview of customer portfolios or track sales quotas.

The entire business intelligence team spends less time on manual reporting and more time solving crucial problems and driving the business forward:

“If I'm doing same thing over and over again, I'm never able to step out the box. Tableau allows us to step out of the box and look at data in a totally different way, which is really what we're here to do,” says Kevin. “From there, we can help them make decisions that drive profitability.”

Coca-Cola Bottling Company sells to grocery stores and pubs, all the way up to big superstores like Walmart. With this breadth of buyers, Coca-Cola’s leadership team aimed to bring mobile analytics to the field sales force via iPads.

“We try to make sure our sales force is not stuck in the office, because we're primarily responsible for selling the product. And spending time in an office looking at metrics, crunching numbers is not their job. Their job is to sell product,” shares Shawn Crenshaw, Senior Business Analyst.

Previously it took up to a whole work day for a sales representative to find metrics around sales performance. With Tableau Mobile, the field sales team and Coca-Cola executives can access analytics in a few clicks. The business intelligence team now creates mobile versions of dashboards to optimise the user experience.

“Everything we've built has to be efficient enough that somebody can get to it in two clicks and they can make a decision right then and there. Tableau has provided us with the ability to not only provide accurate data, but to customise it for the user experience.”

Today, sales representatives can pull up the data anywhere and at any time when they’re out in the field – increasing agility to help sell more product.

“[Both] people in the field and our executives are out in the markets, they're out with customers. So if they have questions, instead of them having to pull up an Excel spreadsheet or pull up some kind of document, they go straight to their iPad, pull up a dashboard and answer the questions right then and there.”

When adopting Tableau as CCBCC’s enterprise platform, the business intelligence team partnered with IT to create a scalable, long-term solution for self-service analytics.

The business intelligence team worked with IT to ensure the proper governance was in place, while shifting day-to-day analytics tasks towards the business.

“With this self-service concept, it's no longer an order-taker type of mentality [for IT]… If you say, we’re going to partner with you, the businessperson can do what they know how to do, and the IT person doesn't necessarily have to know the intricacies or the ins and outs of the business,” says Bryan Franklin, Business Data Architect.

“That sort of collaboration and being able to work together as a team – I think that builds the relationship between IT and the business.”

The result was a faster analytics cycle, leading to more engagement from the business side. And with fewer day-to-day analytics tasks, IT can focus more on long-term data strategy and innovation.