Driving strategy through tech enablement
There can be few more ubiquitous or enduringly popular soft drinks than Coke. The unmistakable caramel-hued fizz, beloved of generations, is consumed the world over. Thanks in no small part to anchor bottlers like Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (HBC). This key strategic bottling partner of the Coca-Cola Company packages and sells its beverages exclusively in 29 markets across three continents.

Committed to growth and sustainability, tech enablement is a key capability for HBC. From leveraging AI-driven systems to monitoring factories for leaks and oil spillages, to having fully automated warehouses and experimenting with inventory drones, this is a company intent on harnessing the power of technology to support both business and people.

Decommissioning legacies to embrace automation
HBC’s relationship with ServiceNow is an established one—having first adopted the platform in 2015. The company’s internal IT department had become reliant on a legacy system so heavily customized it was impossible to upgrade.

Requiring a platform that could be implemented quickly, would allow integration, and had best practice, out-of-the-box functionality, the team looked for a solution. ServiceNow, emerging at the time as a market leader, won out.

“Our vision was that ServiceNow would grow as a platform, and that over time we would benefit from that,” says Angel Antanasov, ServiceNow Platform Owner & Service Management Lead, Coca-Cola HBC.

In the years following implementation of the ServiceNow Platform, HBC focused exclusively on IT Service Management (ITSM), largely for incident and change management. But in 2019, the company began to explore and realize the true potential of the platform. And so a new service portal for IT was launched. The mobile app was put in place and Virtual Agent now brings IT support much closer to employees. Of significant benefit is the DevOps application and change acceleration.

“It’s a game-changer,” says Angel, “it really has the potential to elevate the production deployment governance and further improve the stability of our systems.” The team is using DevOps to integrate its CI/CD pipelines and bring visibility across product teams. With it they’re able to see status and key DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics being monitored to evaluate process performance and maturity. There is a move, too, towards establishing governance through change automation—an initiative to which ServiceNow is seen as being central. By 2025, it’s planned that teams will have different licenses granting them different levels of autonomy when it comes to production deployment.

“Probably more than 30% of major incidents are caused by change,” explains Angel. “If I can reduce that by 50% through proper governance on the pipeline execution, it would save the company hundreds of thousands of euros in downtime in loss of productivity, even reputational damage that can’t be quantified.”

Expanding the platform to optimize user experience
In terms of incident management and core business applications such as CRM, and ERP, at least five partners are involved in the end-to-end support model across the different layers of the product and infrastructure application. “Having ServiceNow to orchestrate all of that is visible in our mean response time,” says Angel. “For critical incidents it’s around 3.5 to 4 hours—I don’t think that would be possible without the automation and the workflows behind it.”

ServiceNow Platform Owner, Angel, collaborates closely with Paul Beleen, Coca-Cola HBC’s Head of Digital PMO, who has led the implementation of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) for Coca-Cola HBC’s business projects. Though ServiceNow was already being leveraged to manage demand and planning, no specific ServiceNow solution had been used previously for business projects. The company had long been reliant on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations to manage projects and present reports. A people survey conducted across the organization revealed that staff handling project management in their own, disparate ways were overwhelmed with work and had no shared insight. Not surprisingly, projects were often delivered late. “It was a nightmare,” says Paul, “to have to go through all the strategic projects every quarter and figure out where we stood. By the time we’d updated the data, it was already obsolete.”

Dedicated to eliminating waste not only on the factory floor but throughout the organization, HBC needed a tool that would reduce processes, bring visibility across the portfolio, and enable regular monthly reporting on strategic projects to senior executives. Crucially, it had to be intuitive and simple.

Portfolio management through a single source of truth
Working with ServiceNow partner Devoteam, Coca-Cola HBC began implementing the SPM framework for business projects—known internally as Smart PMO—in 2022. Work started in November of that year and the rollout to central departments started five months later.

PowerPoint project updates are now consigned to history, with executive teams requesting that reports are drawn only from SPM’s single source of truth. “With one system we can see the entire project universe across the business & IT,” says Paul, “Now our C-Level people have monthly visibility of ServiceNow initiatives.”

Teams once reliant on Excel and PowerPoint, burdened by overwork and beset by delays, have had their experience and productivity transformed. “We can better prioritize, we can improve our resource management, and we can see exactly where delays are and what their impact is,” explains Paul.

Realizing the benefits of a unified platform
Better insights and a single data source mean more informed decision-making and improved resource allocation for HBC, resulting in a 20% increase in efficiencies. And the number of projects it’s now able to measure, manage, and oversee—from idea to execution—is 500. Visibility has been afforded from senior executive to department level and across countries. And the link between the IT department and business projects has enhanced their mutual understanding as both the IT delivery go-live dates and business projects now reside in one system and can be linked with one another for closer collaboration.

For HBC, the use of ServiceNow has evolved from that of a rudimentary ticketing system to becoming an integrated, unified strategic service platform. It will continue to refine SPM through consultation with project managers, further simplifying fields before incorporating such additional features as financial management, goals setting and tracking and roadmap planning, thereby gaining insight into the advantages of any given project in terms of FTE reduction, CapEx expenditure, and order to cash.

Forming a strategic pillar in business transformation
It’s no overstatement that for HBC, ServiceNow has become an integral part of its business transformation and vision for the future. Understanding processes and how time can be given back to people is fundamental to that transformation. And having been identified as one of HBC’s top ten strategic initiatives, ServiceNow is expected to release around 150,000 hours’ worth of oxygen a year across multiple functions.

There are already inroads. HBC is piloting ServiceNow HR Service Delivery, having recently and successfully brought its ‘People and Culture’ function in Nigeria—one of its biggest business units—into the system. And that’s just one piece of the puzzle. A sister organization to IT—HBC’s Business Service Organization (BSO)—concerned with centralized business processes and currently using outdated SAP software, is being brought into the platform via Customer Service Management modules. Today, people are able to chat with Procurement and IT, depending on their need; in the near future, more business functions will be onboarded, and the introduction of Gen AI to those job functionalities will support people in accessing knowledge or self-help.

Meanwhile, in a move away from an inherited, heavily customized data model, implementation of ServiceNow Common Service Data Model (CSDM) is underway. “I just want to make people’s lives easier,” says Angel. “Through ITSM, SPM, HRSD, and CSDM, we’re really seeing the power of a unified, single platform.

“I love ServiceNow,” he adds. “It takes away so much complexity for us. These are exciting times.”