Situation

The Coca-Cola Freestyle dispensers are an innovative offering in the world of food service, increasing customer foot traffic in outlets where they are installed as well as spend per sale. Freestyle dispensers have two distinct advantages over that of tradition level dispensers. First, they allow customers to create their own beverage mixes according to their tastes, and second, they allow both Coca-Cola as well as the local outlet to create promotions and advertisements that can be served on-screen to customers.

Opportunity

In its initial inception, the Content Management System (CMS) that was utilized to deploy content to the Freestyle fleet was constrained in its delivery timelines by both outdated Waterfall project management processes as well as inefficiencies in the business processes that fed into create a content package. Our mission was therefore to address these inefficiencies on multiple fronts.

Solutions 

Business Process Improvement 

To address the business process gaps and inefficiencies that were delaying the release of content packages to the fleet, we embarked on a long-term analysis of current state processes, enlisting the input of stakeholders from Marketing, R&D, Legal, Fluidics, etc. These discovery meetings occurred both as a group as well as one-on-one to get a clear picture of how the CMS was being used by each stakeholder at every step along the process of deploying content to a dispenser. From this richly detailed discovery process, we created a set of baseline “as-is” process flows around the entire Freestyle content management system value stream. Then we were able to visualize in clear detail where the process had gaps and entanglements, where dependencies between stakeholders were interfering in moving the content publishing process forward, and so on. 

We further worked with these same stakeholders to visualize new, more efficient content management processes and how the future “ideal state” usage of CMS would tie in with future development needs. Conducting an analysis and comparison of as-is and ideal states allowed us to make recommendations about changes to the business process around CMS as well as identify specific features that would be needed in future versions of the CMS. These recommendations were implemented over a timeline of 2 years.

Adoption of Agile Project Management Processes 

As part of a company-wide effort to meet market needs more quickly, the Freestyle team adopted an Agile approach to managing the CMS effort, as well as other development initiatives throughout the fleet. Adopting Agile, as well as improving the CMS-related business processes as outlined above, enabled us to realize many advantages and improvements for both the internal FS team as well as Coca-Cola’s outlet customers. 

Outcomes and Benefits 

The gains in efficiencies by “cleaning up” CMS-related business processes, as well as taking an Agile approach to CMS feature development resulted in the following positive outcomes: 

1. Freestyle could now be part of a promotion for any outlet almost on-demand. This wasn’t possible before the above improvements were implemented, as the CMS published content packages roughly twice a year, and this timeline was not flexible, Promises of deploying promotions to any given outlet often had to be retracted in the “before” state. In the “after” state, CMS allows Coke to create marketing programs in real-time and for Coca-Cola to sell those promos to customers according to current seasons, holidays, local sporting or other milestone events, etc. Promos could be also be localized so that an outlet is able to create their own custom promotions which will not be deployed nationwide.

2. CMS also allowed IT to get data back from the dispensers and track in real-time how effective the marketing strategies and promotions are as well as get real-time data about beverage performance, and adjust accordingly. For example, caffeine-free Diet Coke was one of the lowest-performing beverages in the FS fleet except at Wendy’s outlets. It was speculated that this was due to Wendy’s older demographic. The unusual performance of this specific beverage was only illuminated when the new CMS started to receive analytics from the fleet. FS can now promote caffeine-free Diet Coke only at Wendy’s while not promoting it at other outlets where it performed poorly. 

3. Freestyle is now able to react quickly to customer beverage requests and demands. 

4. The enriched data that CMS now enables also helps identify gaps in cartridge use, enabling Coca-Cola to create promotions and beverage mixes that push lesser-used cartridges.