Customer Management IQ speaks to Matt Allington, Business Process Lead at Coca Cola on the sales force automation, selecting suppliers and the future of their global mobility solutions. Matt Allington will be speaking at the Field Service Management 2011. For more information about this event, please visit www.fsmaustralia.com.au or call +61 2 9229 1000 or email enquire@iqpc.com.au

1. Coca Cola’s Global Mobility Solutions
Q&A with Matt Allington, Business Process Lead, Coca-Cola
Field Service & Workforce Mobility 2011
Now in it’s third year, FSM 2011 is undoubtedly the most established event
delivering value to the Australasian service industry. By attending FSM 2011,
you’ll discover strategies being developed to optimise productivity, efficiency
and customer service that will enable you to find benefit for your organisation
Field Service & Workforce Mobility Summit, the leading service event, has
firmly secured its place on the service industry’s calendar, highlighting how
important the in-depth discussions are for you to drive the continual
improvement of your field services and workforce mobility.
This market-leading forum is committed to meeting your needs and in its third
year for 2011 is already recognised as the ‘go-to’ event for Australian service
organisations.
Customer Management IQ: How are you developing your global
mobility solution at Coca-Cola?
Matt: Well, historically, the bottlers and the Coca-Cola Company have
worked on their own, and they built point solutions that meet their specific
needs. And that turned out to be a very expensive (and slow) way to develop
sales force automation. So in 2008, we decided to find our strategic partner
to work with us - an expert in the consumer packaged goods industry and
mobility - to help us build a global template that we could then take and
deploy around the world. Since then, we’ve put together a global team of
business and IT experts. And we’re working together to build this global
template that can then be configured and deployed in individual franchise
bottlers around the world.
Customer Management IQ: How did you identify your needs for
sales force automation and select your supplier to take the project
forward?
Matt: We went through a very extensive requirements gathering process and
started off by meeting with interested franchise bottlers. We had a number of
workshops, we had questionnaires, and we gathered information from these

2. interested bottlers and we took that as the basis of our requirements. We
then took those requirements and went through an extensive vendor
evaluation process, where we looked at the vendors in the industry and found
someone that we thought could best deliver on our needs, and through that
process we selected our vendor of choice.
Customer Management IQ: Can you highlight the benefits and
challenges of delivering a single global mobility platform?
Matt: There’s definitely benefits and lots of challenges of trying to develop
such a global template as the one that we’re working on. Some of the
challenges include the spread of our team - we spread over 6 time zones
around the world, and so that creates its own unique issues, we’re trying to
work with people getting face time and being effective working together. But
the benefits are there because over the last 10 years, we spent tens of
millions of dollars as an independent franchise bottlers in the Coca-Cola
Company, and today we’re still not where near best in class. So the benefits
for us to pull our resources and expertise to come up with one solution that
makes the needs of the bottlers around the world.
Customer Management IQ: What are your expectations and
business goals once you deploy the sales force automation? Any KPIs?
Matt: We don’t have any KPIs as such for the particular project as far as our
uptake by bottlers and those sort of things. Having said that, we have no
shortage of bottlers that are interested to work with us and to deploy the
solution. The most important thing that we work on at the moment is to get
our pilot programme up and running, which is due to go live in November this
year. Once we have that running, we then have a good platform to bring
bottlers from around the world and show them what we’ve done. And out of
that will come the interest to deploy – more broadly around the world.
Customer Management IQ: What’s the next stage for sales force
automation and workforce mobility at Coca-Cola?
Matt: Well, in our current stage in the project, we’ve just finished building
release 1, and as I just said we’re about to go to pilot. Next year we’ll be
focusing on building release 2, which will deliberate a complete set of
software to cover all of the processes for sales force automation. We’ve
already started work with the same partner/supplier in doing direct store
delivery and applications. That means that we’ll be able to create hybrid roles
between our sales force and delivery field force and in to the future; and then
moving forward, we’re also looking at other low-cost devices that can be used
in some of their markets where the cost of technology is high, versus the cost
of the labour.

3. What is the value in attending the Field Service Management 2011
conference?
Matt: I guess what I’ve learned over the years is that success in the field
comes not from the technology, but from the way you execute those
processes in technology; and so, I’ve worked on developing my network of
contacts with industry over the years and we can learn from each other – in a
non-compete way - because it’s all about how you execute in the field.
MATT ALLINGTON – Business Process
Lead, Coca-Cola
Customer Management IQ: Can you tell
us a bit about yourself?
I’ve been in the field sales industry for some
20 years now. I started with Coca-Cola
back in 1989. My first role was a sales rep,
and out of the route trade and field sales
technology was very basic back in those days. I spent the last 15 years
working in sales, working through key account and other sales management
roles; and then about 5 years ago I moved into the IT side of the business,
mainly focusing on IT solutions for sales force.