CONA Services: Embracing digital capabilities in the cloud to boost bottlers’ operational efficiency and competitive advantage
Explore CONA Services’ journey with SAP
When CONA Services LLC, premium provider of IT services for the largest North American Coca-Cola bottlers, planned the transition to SAP S/4HANA, it seized the opportunity to automate more processes and recalibrate its HR and procurement operations. Seeking best-fit options for advanced ERP in its multiyear digital transformation process, it adopted SAP Integration Suite with SAP Ariba and SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Atlanta, Georgia | 80,000 employees |
users enabled to buy compliantly at the right price.
independent bottlers using one instance of SAP SuccessFactors.
separate legal entities supported on one next-generation ERP.
Chief Product Officer of Enabling Functions, CONA Services LLC
Leading the way to more-efficient and data-powered bottling companies
CONA Services LLC is an IT services company for the 12 largest independently owned Coca-Cola bottling companies in North America. Deriving its name from Coke One North America (CONA), it provides a common set of processes, data standards, manufacturing, and customer solutions to participating bottlers that drive their business growth and competitive advantage.
This allows them to optimally run their daily business to refresh the world.
Because its bottlers are 12 separate legal entities, data segregation and security are critical in everything CONA Services does. Committed to staying ahead and using next-generation technologies in its business, CONA Services embarked on a digital transformation journey and transitioned to SAP S/4HANA. The company wanted to ensure a future-forward solution to support its bottlers’ 80,000 employees on a single instance, boosting operational efficiency and data-driven decision-making capabilities while automating manual and time-consuming processes.
As this represented one of the largest migrations to SAP S/4HANA, CONA Services sought critical support from SAP MaxAttention services, enabling a downtime-optimized conversion using the Software Update Manager tool. By executing parts of the data conversion and migration in uptime, CONA Services was able to significantly reduce technical downtime for its 40 TB system to 31 hours, within the business downtime of 50 hours for CONA bottlers. In addition, the data transition validation tool was used to perform data validation during the transition from SAP ERP Central Component to SAP S/4HANA.
Prior to the transition to SAP S/4HANA, CONA Services recalibrated its HR operations for eight of its bottlers. The company also took the opportunity to modernize its procurement operations with a best-fit solution for standardizing the source-to-pay process. Both initiatives were considered important stepping stones to the completion of the digital transformation strategy.
Chief Product Officer of Enabling Functions, CONA Services LLC
Refining service delivery with digital procurement and HR tools
When it came to evaluating best-fit solutions for its procurement requirements, the CONA bottlers quickly assessed that SAP Ariba solutions met their needs. Petra Romano, chief product officer of enabling functions at CONA Services, explains, “When assessing capabilities for providing a great user experience, allowing users to buy what they need at the right time or price and enabling a simplified integration experience were important factors. We wanted to make sure to leverage native integration between the procurement solution and our business backbone on SAP S/4HANA, which is what SAP Ariba enabled us to do.”
SAP Ariba solutions digitalize the procurement workflow from supplier selection to payment processing, simplifying, automating, and standardizing the source-to-pay process and increasing spend visibility enterprise-wide.
For phase one of the implementation, CONA Services configured SAP Business Network and the SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing and SAP Ariba Catalog solutions, automating a compliant purchasing experience. The company then adopted the SAP Ariba Sourcing and SAP Ariba Contracts solutions, allowing sourcing, evaluation, and supplier collaboration to be performed in one connected environment.
Meanwhile, the goal of the company’s HR transformation was to simplify and modernize its HR management suite. Before its transformation, CONA Services managed its bottlers on separate instances of the on-premise solution. By adopting the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, the company could support its independently run bottlers within a single instance in the cloud.
As part of the digitalization journey, CONA Services needed to optimize business processes and establish secured connectivity and communication channels with its business partners. Supporting multiple integration platforms was costly, requiring different skill sets for development and support. So CONA Services was looking to minimize integration costs and complexity. To do so, it connected multiple SAP solutions and third-party applications using SAP Integration Suite on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). With the API Management capability within SAP Integration Suite, the organization can support multiple business processes.
Using SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP, CONA Services has reduced the organization’s runtime cost by more than 50% while efficiently supporting multiple client applications through common APIs. This has improved the customer onboarding process and minimized data errors, increasing master data accuracy for downstream processes.
Director, Middleware and Integration, CONA Services LLC
Minimizing friction in critical business transactions
Having implemented SAP Business Network and a suite of SAP Ariba solutions, CONA Services modernized buying experiences for its bottlers’ users as well as for its suppliers, allowing smooth business transactions with minimal friction. This has enabled more than 9,000 users at the 12 bottlers to buy the right item at the right price at the right time. With enhanced indirect procurement capabilities in addition to a modern and simplified user interface, collaborating with the suppliers has been simplified. As such, the number of processed purchase orders has increased, as has the number of suppliers users transact with.
In addition, with SAP Ariba Sourcing and SAP Ariba Contracts, as well as the advanced reporting and analytics add-on for the SAP Ariba Spend Analysis solution, users can better analyze spend for more informed purchasing decisions. With enhanced visibility across the procurement process from source to pay, bottlers have tighter control over their procurement spend and tighter invoice management so that suppliers are paid the correct amount at the right time.
Sripathi Jitta, product director for procurement solutions at CONA Services, explains that part of the success in the adoption of the cloud-based solutions lies in thoughtful change management processes. They enable the right solution for the right users at the right time. “From CONA Services’ perspective, we enable the change management framework, then hand it over to the bottlers who localize it and deploy to their users in the best way for their organization.”
He adds, “We currently use SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing and SAP Business Network, supporting 9,000 end users and 2,700 suppliers who are transacting on SAP Business Network using 435 catalogs. Having one technology foundation from sourcing to invoice management is helping us serve the bottlers better.”
Through its HR transformation to the cloud using SAP SuccessFactors to enhance HR and talent management processes across the employee lifecycle, CONA Services has seen considerable efficiencies in its HR management and payroll operations.
Mark Bryner, product director for HR and payroll technologies at CONA Services, says that with SAP responsible for the solution infrastructure and product vision, it frees the internal team to focus on exploring how new features can benefit its bottling business. This includes an exciting partnership with SAP, Capgemini North America Inc., Paradox Inc., and R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company to revolutionize the hiring experience and create a candidate-centric pipeline from application to hire. CONA Services has used conversational AI, SAP BTP, and robotic process automation to redefine the onboarding experience.
Bryner explains, “For our bottling community, some of the benefits of moving to SAP SuccessFactors solutions include having the power of SAP behind the cloud system managing the infrastructure, rather than us having to handle that with our internal team. Being in the cloud also enables us to take advantage of new innovations as they are released. This allows our team to focus on communicating with our customer base, helping them incorporate new enhancements into their processes, as well as testing, deploying, and stabilizing the new features.”
Maximizing value from transitioning to next-generation ERP
In terms of the company’s HR road map, Romano says that there are major projects on the horizon. “As many of our bottlers aspire to support a culture of learning within their organizations, we’re looking at how best to deploy learning management solutions. We also really want to maximize the capabilities that we have already deployed or that we could deploy within the suite of SAP SuccessFactors solutions.”
As for its procurement operations, Romano adds that CONA Services wants to explore using SAP BTP to create an app that allows its bottlers to handle supplier inquiries in a more efficient way. “Instead of logging into different systems, that app would allow them to immediately have what they need at their fingertips.”
Likewise, the organization is looking to explore new AI capabilities and AI-assisted user experiences from SAP as they are rolled out. CONA Services sees enormous potential in using the new capabilities to help it further optimize application development processes and improve customer experiences through enhancing services and support.