CCBA takes ownership of its digital transformation journey

Market leadership across a continent
Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is Africa’s leading soft drinks business. It already boasts impressive figures: 600,000 outlets served, 39 bottling plants, and a number-one position in most of the 14 territories where it operates.

The business believes it can do even better. Consumption levels across Africa are lower than in other parts of the world, and it has promised to invest further in distribution and marketing.

Brand awareness and product innovation will help drive growth, but the real opportunity for CCBA is in knitting together its broad business, finding new efficiencies, and raising productivity. The business has more than 20,000 employees across southern and eastern Africa, many of whom work remotely.

The challenge is to establish seamless, digital workflows across the organization. CCBA needs to track daily distribution and stock levels and sales teams need access to the latest customer data while working remotely. The group is in a constant state of onboarding new customers, outlets, and employees. The effective management of this complex, fast-changing IT environment is critical. CCBA took ownership with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), simplifying the management process and gathering the data to inform improvements.

Unifying IT service management
ServiceNow ITSM establishes a unified approach to IT processes. It consolidates two separate systems used in the South African business and in those across the Rest of Africa (ROA). Previously, with the service desk located in South Africa, employees calling from other countries across Africa would require additional approval for international dialling, which created an extra layer of complexity and cost when logging tickets and getting the support they needed.

The ITSM implementation was conducted alongside ITC Infotech, a ServiceNow partner out of India. The project team comprised five heads from CCBA and four from ITC Infotech.

“We went from RFP to big bang deployment with all the necessary integrations within 180 days. It was seamless,” recalls Jolene Coetzee Moolman, CCBA’s IT Practice and Governance Manager. “We made sure to take ownership. We understood that this was our project, our business process. We didn’t want to rely on a vendor to deliver the project in isolation.”

After choosing ServiceNow and partner, ITC Infotech, from a host of vendors, Jolene and the ICT Infotech team participated in a five-day pre-design workshop in Bangalore, followed by a five-day design workshop in Johannesburg. “We quickly established that the quality of master data would make or break the deployment,” Jolene recalls. “We launched big bang on the same day that the new Service Desk and Operations Center (SDOC) went live. This included: incident, request, change, problem, self-service portal, the mobile app, knowledge management, SolarWinds (used for Event Management), BizFrame (used for Asset Management to support the ServiceNow CMDB), and all associated notifications (push and email) and SLAs, OLAs, and UCs.” At this time, CCBA also launched its contact center solution (Genesys) with integration into ServiceNow. “All vendors and internal resolvers were trained on the system and processes by the deployment team during the 180 days,” says Jolene.

The engagement means CCBA has clearer visibility of its IT service function. There is a clear audit trail and a central hub for reporting. The business is better able to sift through data to spot emerging issues before they impact, for instance, tickets are auto logged when defined thresholds are reached and routed to support teams as needed. And the SDOC, which monitors the company’s IT infrastructure in real time, facilitates the company’s major incident process and associated business communications, limiting the need for business users to report major outages. Thanks to integrated ITSM processes, the SDOC has access to the FSC (forward schedule of change) to help identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues.

“Digitization is at the core of our business agenda,” says Jolene. “ServiceNow enables us to harmonize and streamline processes, deliver rapid support, and take ownership of our master data.”

This digitalization includes the launch of a new app for users to log issues and self-serve a range of tasks from any location, such as accessing live updates on ticket status and FAQs to self-sooth or resolve issues. This is a major advantage in areas with poor network connectivity or where there may be prohibitive telco charges.

The use of the app means more users can access the service desk more of the time. Automation and self-service mean CCBA is to extend its IT service workload with no increase in headcount. The reduction in time-consuming manual processes has helped the organization integrate a dedicated chat within Microsoft Teams and create a Center of Excellence for application support, just nine months after go-live, from the same resource pool. 

“Since the introduction of ServiceNow, we’ve been able to deliver rapid IT support, improving overall response times, SLAs, and overall customer satisfaction. IT General Controls (ITGCs) are now a breeze since the ITSM adoption. We continue to see higher first contact resolution rates at the SDOC,” summarizes Jolene.

Accelerating upgrades to generate momentum
For CCBA, ServiceNow ITSM includes incident, problem, request, change, release, and configuration management. Crucially for future upgrades, it also includes Automated Test Framework (ATF).

Though pleased with the speed of the original big bang deployment, Jolene says her team came unstuck when attempting the first upgrade. This took 22 business days and occupied the team for considerably longer than anticipated.

By using the ATF, Jolene and the team have succeeded in reducing subsequent upgrade times. The second upgrade took 14 days, then eight. The most recent took just four days. ATF means CCBA can replace manual testing with automation and can roll back failed tests to a clean state.

“We’ve made sure to document every specific requirement,” says Jolene. “We’ve then been able to reuse test instances or find ATFs to repurpose. We feel we’re future-proofing our upgrade process.”

The direct benefit to the improved upgrade cadence is time- and resource-saving. Jolene’s team can be redirected to fresh projects and support additional value-adds. The softer benefit is reputational: the team is seen as progressive, increasingly efficient, and capable of delivering ongoing improvement.

“We’ve effectively freed up a whole business month,” Jolene says. “That equates to savings for the business but also allows us to focus on the things that matter.”

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