Coca-Cola’s HR and Finance shared services are using Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce to optimize operational performance – enabling a shift from an 8-hour day to a 24-hour day – with no additional head count. Existing staff are also liberated to focus on delivering higher value work – while having the capacity to enhance their customer experience too.
Coca-Cola is the world’s largest beverage company and one of the most valuable global brands. The 130-year-old household name has more than 500 brands in 200 countries, with 200 Million customers and 1.9 Billion products consumed daily.
Improving Process Efficiencies
Over the last several years, Coca-Cola has consolidated its HR and Finance shared services organizations, along with its customer contact center. These multi-function business services now cater for the demands of Coca-Cola’s North American franchise bottlers, so they are free to focus on their business operations.
However, Coca-Cola operates within a culture of continuous improvement and the company has three key objectives that it must consistently achieve:
- Seamlessly execute HR processes and strategies as an extension of the client organization
- Deliver timely and accurate Payroll and HR operational processes – with constant process improvement and best practices
- Resolve employee inquiries with a high quality experience
To help address these goals, Coca-Cola initially started using Blue Prism’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform to automate processes within its finance division – and from there, explored opportunities within other divisions – with HR being a key area of focus.
Process Selection
To identify relevant process candidates for automation and build a pipeline, Coca-Cola began by talking to internal SMEs that owned the most manual HR processes.
Questions asked included: process volume, how often processes are handled and how many hand-offs occur.
These criteria were examined to determine which processes scored the highest for viability, posed the greatest risk and how many people were involved in the process. To provide a single source of truth on everything related to each process, Coca-Cola also put up to 85 percent of its HR processes into an intuitive online mapping tool.
This insight enabled the company to understand how much automation could be applied to each of the 150 identified processes.
HR Audits
In prior years, the HR services team ran HR audits only for Coca-Cola Refreshments. But after the company’s franchising environment changed, it was responsible for auditing eight different sets of data.
Coca-Cola was running reports, getting them audited and spent time formatting them for analyzing exceptions and anomalies in the results. Action would then be taken, if for example, the data had a mismatch.
Coca-Cola’s HR group is now running HR audits in SAP while leveraging Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce. Considering there are over 50 processes – across multiple SAP systems, with multiple people touching them – this automation has created a significant time saving and is able to drive more focus on the resulting data than ever before.
Coca-Cola is now able to stagger the deployment timing of these reports to load balance the work but has the assurance that these reports are always being generated and come directly to them – to manage the exceptions manually – when required.
Also, reports can be tracked in a case management system to determine when things were delivered and actioned – something that was not possible in the manual process. Assisted by Blue Prism’s Digital Workers, Coca-Cola didn’t need to add headcount to handle the expanded work – and crucially, the results are always completely accurate. Karla Younger, Vice President of HR Services, at Coca-Cola, who is leading the HR transformation said,
“Blue Prism’s Digital Workers provide the added capacity to get us from an 8-hour day to a 24-hour day – while improving accuracy, because we no longer just take a sample of the HR audit data. We can see every transaction that’s happening and provide 100 percent coverage on that.”
The Customer Experience
Another key aim for Coca-Cola’s HR services’ RPA initiatives, is to remove time-consuming, transactional work, so the company can dedicate more time providing the human interaction and time needed to work through sensitive or complex employee situations. Karla Younger, explains,
“In the past, we might have had difficulty with the number of resources available, or the ability to really get deep into something and find out the cause of an issue – or help them resolve a problem that’s affecting their business. Blue Prism’s Digital Workers have helped us enhance the customer experience by liberating human resources to spend more time on issues that might be affecting customers.”
Re-skilling Human Workers and Augmenting Talent
Replacing human employees with Digital Workers has never been the plan at Coca-Cola. In fact, the HR services team is planning a staff re-skilling program. As the company automates manual tasks, individuals will be shifted into more advanced roles that involve more valuable, analytical work.
Coca-Cola is prepared for these types of roles and is training employees with future skills. As well as progressing along an HR career path, those tech savvy employees, who want to build on those skills – could work on RPA initiatives too.
Karla Younger adds,
“We want our employees to be on the edge of innovation – driving creativity and opportunities. We might try something that doesn’t work, and we learn from that and move on to something that will work. I think we’re creating an environment that fosters this, and our employees are excited about it.”
The Business Impact
As well as consistently delivering greater operational efficiencies, Blue Prism’s Digital Workers have given Coca-Cola the capacity to extend productivity – shifting from an 8-hour day to a 24-hour working day.
This has been achieved without further head count being required to handle ever expanding work. Existing staff are also liberated to focus on delivering more valuable, exciting, tasks – while having the capacity to enhance the customer experience.
Improved compliance is another win, as HR audit reports are now trackable – and with an increase in the quality of process data, new insights will be gained to further improve the company’s operational performance.
To learn more about Blue Prism RPA, contact us today!
