G&J Pepsi Strives for Operational Excellence with Microsoft

Slashed licensing fees, reduced implementation costs and proved ROI

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers, Inc., the US's largest independent Pepsi bottler, consistently looks for ways to improve its operations to drive business growth, and is an IT standard-bearer in the bottling and distribution industry.

Like many companies fighting for market share, G&J Pepsi's Chris Witzgall, Vice President of Information Systems, is constantly exploring ways that technology will drive operational efficiency throughout the company's 11 locations in Ohio and Kentucky so that he not only reduces costs, but supports sales, marketing, production and other departments in order to grow revenues. G&J focuses mostly on the activities that impact their core bottling and distribution centered businesses. Then they collaborate with a small number of partners to outsource non-strategic commodity workload.

With the help of a consulting company., G&J Pepsi's IT team removed workloads by moving email and collaboration tools to the cloud using Microsoft's Office 365. They boosted their ability for real-time from anywhere on any device communication with LyncEnterprise Voice. Furthermore, they added Windows Azure to enable disaster recovery from the cloud. Then G&J outsourced the support of Office 365, Lync Voice, and a major piece of their server infrastructure to Outcousing company. By shifting some processes to cloud computing and outsourcing others, G&J Pepsi became more agile and efficient.

The transition allowed Witzgall's small IT team to stop maintaining, monitoring, patching and fixing the complex configuration problems with these workloads. By shifting to Office 365, G&J avoided spending $30,000+ in future hardware and software upgrades needed to support the latest version of Exchange.

"We were spending many hours a month on Exchange patches, backups and maintaining storage for the virtualization environment," Witzgall said. "Email is one of those areas we feel is more of a commodity service, and any time we spend supporting it is not time well spent."

Witzgall has worked with consultant on multiple projects to automate G&J's infrastructure. He views consultant as an extension of his IT team, and the partnership allows him to service the company's 1,600 employees with a small IT staff. In fact, the first time Witzgall engaged with consultant to explore moving to the cloud, consulting company recommended waiting. “G&J had already upgraded their infrastructure to the latest releases, their infrastructure was solid and running well – so it made sense for them to wait until the next major revisions were released in the cloud before they migrated,” says President of cloud consulting company.

The consultant team walked Witzgall through possible options for migrations and technology that would allow G&J employees to access information from any device with a single sign on. Consulting company  then gathered information to help Witzgall make the business case for moving the company's email to the cloud and adding Lync and Azure.

Pre-Assessment Analysis Reveals Cost Savings 
Consulting company completed a technical assessment to make sure G&J could easily move to the cloud, and then a business assessment to make sure that such a move aligned with company business objectives. Consultant also provided a detailed hard cost return-on-investment report demonstrating how the new technologies would help G&J not only save money but give employees tools to help them operate and communicate more efficiently.

Pre-Assessment Analysis : G&J Pepsi also received a written plan explaining how to get ready for a cloud migration and a project plan outlining who would own what part of the migration to make sure everyone was on the same page. The process also includes documentation on how to set up the new system, how to cut users over and a communication plan IT managers use to tell employees what is going to happen and when. Consultant also provides end user training guides so employees know how to use the new system’s functionality.

Consultant's role was to manage the project, build the redundancy and failover capability and ensure there was no data loss in the migration to Office 365.

Because Consultant carefully watches Microsoft partner incentives, consultant was able to alert G&J Pepsi to funding from Microsoft that allowed G&J to reduce the consulting costs of installation by 75%. Additionally, Consultant helped G&J secure and utilize 100 free licenses of Office 365 and a promotion that offered an 80% cut in the retail cost of Office 365 licenses, saving G&J Pepsi's $100,000 over three years.

"The implementation was very smooth," Witzgall said. "Consultant handled the initial set up and testing, which was crucial. Then they helped us get the first set of users up and going, and we took it from there, with consultant acting as a resource when we needed it."

Moving to Office 365 allowed G&J Pepsi to eliminate $1,500 in annual spam filtering costs and another $2,500 in annual maintenance for Symantec Enterprise Vault, which the company used for email archiving. The move to the cloud-based system also freed up about 3 TB of storage, and it allowed G&J to give everyone in the company access to email with Microsoft’s low cost kiosk emails plans. HR will be streamlining their processes with this new digital communication channel.

Lync Drives Internal and Partner Collaboration 
The bulk of G&J Pepsi's 1,600 employees work in 11 locations in two states. In addition, many employees work from home, and the salesforce operates in the field on more than 300 routes. Because of the dispersed work force, G&J needed a more robust and mobile friendly collaboration system. Consultant helped them upgrade to the latest version of  Lync Enterprise Voice, which give them a new level of functionality including better mobile access and enhanced web meetings.

Upgrading to Lync 2013 "allows people to participate in meetings easier, and access corporate information in real time," Witzgall said. Mobile employees previously printed information from their laptops or had to drive around looking for good wifi Internet connections if they wanted to participate in meetings while they were traveling.

Now, they can provide customers instant information from their devices of choice and join meetings from their smartphone, tablet or other device no matter where they are, and no matter what operating system their device uses, he said.

Azure Allows On-Premise Integration with Cloud Applications 
Like many companies, G&J Pepsi needs its technology systems to be highly available and redundant. As part of building that redundancy, Consultant showed G&J how using Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform would provide them with disaster recovery for its critical authentication workloads.

 Those workloads include Active Directory for user authentication, Directory sync for synchronizing users and groups between their on premise network and the cloud, and Password sync, which allows users to have single sign on abilities for their desktop computer and web applications.

"Azure's infrastructure as a service allows us to have full functionality to authenticate users without on premise equipment, so if we lost our datacenter, our employees can still fully communicate," Witzgall said.

With Azure, resources are readily available and accessible, user authentication requests are quick because Azure sits in the same data center as Office 365, and companies do not have to build the hardware or obtain software licenses to run it from their own data center.

From Blocking & Tackling to Proactive Business Decision-Making

 Removing basic blocking and tackling technology maintenance tasks like email, backups and worries about disaster recovery allow Witzgall and his team to think more about how they approach the business and how they can make employees more productive.

"One of the biggest benefits is that Office 365 allows us to give our sales team all the information they need to get their jobs done," Witzgall said. Coupled with Lync, employees have "the tools they need to make a sale and to make more sales. Without a productive sales team, the company isn't going to grow." G&J continues to grow their partnership with  Consulting company. “They are on our same wavelength for outsourcing and being efficient. The consulting company continues to find ways to gain funding for us and use technology even if it means less revenue to themselves,” concludes Witzgall.


Originally published at  http://arbirage.blogspot.my/2015/07/g-pepsi-strives-for-operational.html

Coca-Cola Enterprises used Microsoft SharePoint Online to Advance Productivity

“Microsoft gave us an incredible platform that allows us to do a number of things, beyond hosting our portal. It provides workflow management and team collaborationacross geographies and time zones.” John Key, Assistant Director Communication and Collaboration Technologies,CCE  




Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) employs approximately 72,000 people in 431 facilities around the globe. Much of its workforce is mobile with 55,000 vehicles and 2.4 million coolers, vending machines, and beverage dispensers. With increasing competition in the marketplace, CCE needed a more effective way to collaborate with its employees, to increase its productivity, to enable better flow of information and to create more time for sales persons to engage with customers. Its worldwide presence required employees and executives to spend numerous hours on the road every week, travelling to internal meetings. With Microsoft® Online Servicestechnologies, CCE can save travel expenses through online meeting tools andcollaboration platforms that span time zones and geographies.

Overview
 Country or Region: Worldwide
Industry: Consumer goods—Retail

User Profile 
Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is the world’s largest marketer, producer, and distributor of nonalcoholic beverages, which it delivers with the industry’s most effective marketplace execution.  

Business Situation 
CCE’s increasing competition was resulting in declining revenues. This required company executives to launch a new strategic direction, mandating a platform to communicate and engage with all employees.

Solution 
Microsoft deployed a hosted worldwide intranet, messaging and collaboration toolswhich are accessible to all employees from any device, enabling employees to boost productivity and time with customers.

Benefits 
 Productivity and customer focus
 Companywide intranet
 IT transformation
 Effective remote teams
 Deskless worker access











Situation 
Coca-Cola Enterprises (NYSE: “CCE”) is the world's largest marketer, producer, and distributor of Coca-Cola products. Coca-Cola Enterprises’ growing product portfolio includes the world’s greatest brands and beverages which they deliver with the industry’s most effective marketplace execution. Today, they serve 419 million consumers throughout North America, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Monaco, and the Netherlands. They employ approximately 72,000 people and operate more than 431 facilities, 55,000 vehicles, and 2.4 million coolers, vending machines, and beverage dispensers.

The Business Challenge 

Coca-Cola Enterprises faced strong competition from other beverage companies and needed a way to work more effectively with their customers and partners. This required innovation and a new way of doing business within the corporation. In 2008 CCE acknowledged their current communication platforms were no longer enabling the innovation and collaboration required to take them to the next level to compete in an increasingly demanding economic environment.

Communicate with all Employees: CCE required a centralized platform on which to promote the company’s initiatives. Its messaging was based largely around e-mail, which was unable to reach its largely mobile workforce. Chairman and CEO John Brock and CIO Esat Sezer agreed that in order to evolve the company culture and improve customer relationships at CCE, the leadership team needed the ability to communicate with all CCE employees, especially those managing day-to-day operations in the field. Most of the diverse CCE personnel work in a distributed manner. Employees in manufacturing facilities had limited access to the corporate network. The mobile employees of their delivery fleet who are on the front line with the customers, making sales and positioning the CCE products in store environments, also lacked convenient access to company e-mail and content. Additionally, CCE needed a way to drive action and information to all employees in their business by role. Current infrastructure did not allow for this, making it difficult to find appropriate content in a timely manner. 

Kevin Flowers, Director of Enabling Technologies, says, "John Brock, our CEO, challenged us to find better ways to connect all of our employees. He asked us to create a unified way to reach all of the field resources for more than 400 locations in the U.S. alone, SharePoint Online addressed those challenges and helped us launch from a legacy infrastructure to a solution which provided better business value to all of our people."

Deliver a Unified Collaborative Workspace and Corporate Intranet: Taking on a new project like building a corporate intranet was exciting, yet daunting, as IT resources were engaged on many other initiatives as part of their transformation journey. IT considered leveraging partners to address their messaging needs and wanted to expand this to include the development of their corporate intranet. Both solutions needed to support mobile devices to reach employees in manufacturing facilities and the field.

Solution

With many older systems, CCE had several partners providing dozens of communication and collaboration solutions. CCE saw an opportunity to optimize its infrastructure by broadening its relationship with Microsoft. With the implementation of Microsoft Online Services, which includes Microsoft SharePoint® Online,Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting, CCE consolidated and streamlined its IT partnerships and enhanced its focus on providing value to the business. CCE deployed its corporate intranet on SharePoint Online as its primary collaboration platform, which included content management, enterprise search, workflow, line of business integration, and rights management capabilities. In its assessment of whether to upgrade its current platform or transform the company to a hosted model, CCE considered options presented by several major software and service providers. CCE desired a partnership where it could utilize its enterprise software on premises with integrated software services in the cloud, and turned to Microsoft to execute upon its objectives. Planning for the project began in mid January 2008 and was completed by mid May. Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online received “service acceptance” by July and user migration for both began in September.By the end of 2008, 23,000 users had been migrated to Exchange Online, 30,000 users were on SharePoint Online, and 10,000 users had migrated from IBM Sametime to Microsoft Office Communications Server for instant messaging. It added Microsoft Office Live Meeting for Web and video conferencing in April 2008. 

Security

Initially, Tim Smith, the Chief Information Security Officer at CCE needed to be convinced that Microsoft would provide security measures that matched or exceeded CCE’s stringent requirements. Visiting the Tukwila data center, Smith was impressed by the virtual and physical security provided by Microsoft, as well as the third-party SAS 70 audit reports that Microsoft uses to monitor security compliance. Tim Smith, CCE Chief Information Security Officer, says, “Step one in getting comfortable with giving our data to Microsoft was visiting one of their data centers. To understand the physical nature of what they’re doing to safeguard not only their own information, but also CCE’s, gave us a great sense of comfort that Microsoft has thought of all the right things.”

A fundamental shift occurred in how CCE viewed Microsoft services and capabilities running in Microsoft data centers, not as an outsourcing arrangement, but as a security-enhanced extension of CCE’s own enterprise network.

The Right Information at the Right Time CCE decided to use Microsoft integrated communication and collaboration tools to streamline communication across its entire organization. A critical component of the corporate intranet portal at CCE was the integration of SAP user role information into its on-premises Active Directory® service and its Microsoft SharePoint Online environment. This will allow CCE to target the right information to the right employee based on roles outlined in SAP. By integrating SAP data into SharePoint sites, CCE employees can access data through recognizable Microsoft Office programs, giving employees the ability to make information for business operations easy to find, share, and update. Previously, CCE did not have a common solution that enabled document management. Documents that needed to be shared with colleagues were housed in shared folders on network drives, sent via e-mail, or stored in team rooms, all of which were limited in access, version control, and searchability.

Ease and Effectiveness of Collaboration Seeing the business need and the ability to increase its communication and collaboration capabilities, CCE was able to move very quickly to execute the migration. Lauren Sayeski, Public Affairs and Communications Manager, says, “We had a massive change agenda that we were trying to communicate to the organization. We had a lot of objectives with this project, but the two primary ones were a better way to communicate with our employees while at the same time driving effectiveness and efficiency.”Content management features on SharePoint Online include version management, workflow management, and rights management, all of which enable seamless collaboration across geographies and time zones. John Key, Assistant Director of Communication and Collaboration Technologies, says, “To have one source of the truth is very important as teams start to form across the globe. You want to be sure you always have the latest version of the document you’re working on. SharePoint Online makes that possible.” 

Knowledge Sharing and Social Networking CCE’s executive communication prior to its new corporate intranet was historically top-down. With its Microsoft SharePoint Online intranet solution, it now has open dialogue with employees communicating to leadership and with each other. Sayeski says, “We focused on ways for employees to comment back to the organization as well as communicate with each other. Now we have the ability to post comments on the intranet and create team sites. We’re finding that employees are talking to each other and using each other’s resources, sharing knowledge. We launched our first CEO blog last year and in the first five minutes had more than 40 responses back. That’s just the beginning; we know that the intranet can be so much more powerful as a place of action.”



Benefits

Productivity and Customer Focus The Microsoft solution enabled CCE to bring new technologies to everyone in the company, providing them with the information they need, where and when they need it most. Microsoft SharePoint Online has been embraced by employees across the company. Within four weeks of enabling users to create team sites, there were over 800 requests for sites focused on business priorities and customer-facing business teams. Tom Barlow, Vice President of Business Transformation, N.A., says, “From a business transformation perspective, we have a lot of projects underway which focus on revenue generation and cost savings. Through the use of SharePoint Online, we’re able to educate our team so that they can find information and establish interdependencies across the different projects. SharePoint allows us to code and manage information so that we can get it very quickly.”

Worldwide Collaboration 

CCE now has a robust intranet portal to support worldwide collaboration and communication of corporate strategy. Two consulting company designed the custom intranet and collaboration solution respectively on top of Microsoft SharePoint Online. One consulting company created the compelling visual design with a user-based enterprise portal workflow. The other consulting companydesigned and developed custom SharePoint features in accordance with Microsoft development standards and best practices, as well as provided guidance to CCE regarding the deployment and configuration options available in SharePoint Online. Sayeski says, “When you have a workforce like ours, 72,000 strong and geographically dispersed, that may or may not have access to technology, it can be a challenge to ensure that the message of the organization is getting through with the clarity and the speed that you want it to. We focused heavily on the use of video, particularly with our CEO, to ensure that some of our most critical messages were being captured in a way that the audience immediately understood. So combining the power of video with the intranet gave us the ability to touch many more people.” 

Powerful Search with Enterprise Content Management 

The corporate intranet also serves as a central location for things like CCE’s HR process improvement and self-service HR portal and provides a communication platform for CCE’s desk-based workers. CCE has also increased employee engagement and education around corporate responsibility and sustainability through the portal content, thereby addressing the cultural change initiative. Sayeski says, “There have been some particular areas where we’ve seen that concept of two-way dialogue playing out very well. One is in our corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts where employees are sharing—actively sharing their own ideas and their own solutions within their own facilities about ways they’re generating energy effectiveness.”

Through the intranet, CCE employees are eager to be part of the company direction and dialogue. Brett Kirkland, Collaboration Architect, says, “The SharePoint Online search engine is ten times better. It allows us to make items more discoverable, to check them in and out, and surface particular items that we consider pieces of content that should rise to the top. The SharePoint solution also gives IT more control and governance over what content is published and how it is ranked and profiled in search.”

Key says, “Microsoft gave us an incredible platform that allows us to do a number of things, beyond hosting our portal. It provides workflow management and team collaboration across geographies and time zones.” 

The Road Ahead

In phase II, CCE will be expanding the Microsoft footprint to reach an additional 42,000 deskless workers who work in the field or in sales/distribution facilities. These employees do not have computers but will be enabled in phase II to have access to the intranet via Microsoft SharePoint Online through computer workstations at their facilities. Additionally, Microsoft is co-developing a sales force automation system that will further take advantage of SharePoint Online and enable local merchandisers to be more efficient in getting the things they need into the outlets and stores. CCE will also be using Microsoft Office Communications Server desktop voice and video for multi-user applications and adding more than 10,000 BlackBerry users. 

Kevin Flowers concludes, “There was huge excitement and energy around the CCE partnership with Microsoft. This has been one of the best IT partner projects CCE has experienced, and we have the added value of a longer IT roadmap with Microsoft than if CCE had built the solution on premises. This project has exceeded our expectations from an IT standpoint, showing how well an organization can lay a foundation and transform the way people communicate in a large company.”

Excerpt from :  http://arbirage.blogspot.my/2015_06_01_archive.html