By Freya Purnell
Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) has signed a five-year multimillion-dollar agreement with IBM, to manage CCA’s mission-critical SAP infrastructure in a cloud environment.
Australia and Indonesia will be the first of CCA’s six countries to use the IBM cloud platform, hosted in its Sydney data centre, with the other South Pacific operations (New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Samoa) expected to be transitioned over time.
The cloud project will optimise and streamline CCA’s order management and distribution processes, increase operational efficiencies, and deliver consistent and exceptional quality of customer experience across the two geographies.
“We have a complex distribution network which requires our systems to be very efficient,” said CCA CIO Barry Simpson. “Indonesia is a vastly different market to Australia, as it has a more diverse trade to support across both modern and traditional channels.
“By using a common cloud platform across Australia and Indonesia, we will be able to standardise and automate our operations and bring a consistent level of efficiency to our Indonesia business. Importantly, this will enable us to focus on growing our market share in Indonesia – which is a major opportunity for us in 2014,” said Simpson.
Grant Thomson, cloud business leader for IBM, says CCA’s move to keep its IT infrastructure in Australia to service its South Pacific operations – in the process saving significant revenue – is an excellent example of how to leverage the power and flexibility of cloud computing.
“CCA’s plans to have Sydney serve as a cloud hub for its entire South Pacific footprint via IBM’s cloud platform will bring enhanced operational efficiency to its entire organisation,” said Thomson. “CCA will be able to leverage best-practice processes from its Australian operation and apply them to the rest of the South Pacific region.”
