Distribution and Chain Supply

Essay by npr1955 October 2004

download word file, 3 pages 4.0

The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company was receiving orders from its most important customers and partners through electronic data interchange. To meet changing needs in the business-to-business environment, reduce cost, and streamline processes, a central business platform had to be created for electronic procurement. To accomplish that, The Coca-Cola Company turned to the Microsoft.Net Enterprise Servers and replaced its old procedures with one built on BizTalk Server 2000. (www.Microsoft.com)

An American pharmacist by the name of John S. Pemberton was looking for a new product to combat fatigue, weakness, and headaches. He studied and experimented, fiddled and mixed. In 1896, he found the solution and the first coca-cola concentrate was born.

Just as creativity was behind Coca-Cola's initial success, the business has remained a leader in innovation to the present day, even when it comes to the deployment of information technology. In the spirit of that innovative tradition, The Coca-Cola Company, with headquarters in the Zurich Dietlikon, now uses Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 as its central communication platform.

The Coca-Cola Company receives the beverage orders of its largest and most important partners and customers through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Since the mid-1980s, this procedure has been the basis for a standardized exchange of structured data between different organizations. To reduce costs and streamline processes, the ordering process first had to be automated. In the existing system, beverage orders arrived from EDI-equipped partners at Coca-Cola's clearing center, where an EDI converter transformed them into flat files for the company system. This information arrived as batched files and was saved in a database on an AS/400 system. Typical of EDI systems, batching created an end result that was slow and inefficient, so Coca-Cola wanted improvements.

The Information Technology Manager at Coca-Cola wanted to improve productivity and free up resources,