Coca-Cola Rolls Out Next-Gen Field App

Spring Mobile Solutions, a leading global provider of mobile solutions for the consumer goods industry, has deployed an advanced field sales application that is empowering Coca-Cola bottlers across North America to reduce operating costs, increase workforce efficiency and drive revenue growth.

“User adoption was poor, communication was ineffective, and syncing with our back-office systems was slow and unreliable with the solution we were using at that time,” explains David South, director of architecture for mobility and UI for CONA Services LLC, the IT group within the Coca-Cola system that chose to partner with Spring Mobile Solutions.

The move to Spring is helping CONA bottler sales representatives complete field tasks faster, leverage trends and promotional opportunities, and spend more time advising and upselling customers. “With Spring,” South explains, “we found a solution that’s easy to work with and that lets all the data syncing happen in the background without interruption. Training time has dropped from 80 hours down to approximately four hours. Our reps couldn’t be happier.”

The CONA Services bottlers wanted to give reps a more efficient order-taking tool. They also wanted to provide sales managers with a better way to monitor field sales activities and coach individual reps in real time.

“We offered CONA Services and its bottlers a cloud-based, out-of-the-box solution that integrated seamlessly with SAP,” explains Spring’s senior vice president of sales, Robin Seth. “The users have been extremely happy with our advanced pricing engine, our unrivaled offline functionality and our sophisticated data capture. For CONA Services, speed of deployment and scalability was also another important factor in the evaluation and we are delighted that the solution was delivered within 3 months.

CONA Services bottlers have deployed the new Spring mobile app to 6,500 reps, and will be adding more than 10,000 additional reps now through 2019. To ensure rapid scaling, Spring opted to host the solution with Microsoft Azure. This gave them the ability to dynamically expand their infrastructure as well as set up useful testing environments to ensure optimal functionality.

“Spring was the right choice for us, because we got the technology and the specific CPG functionality we needed in a user-friendly solution that our reps love,” explains Rohit Lal, CONA Services’ director of enterprise architecture. “With Spring, we gained the flexibility to quickly modify functionality like the order-entry process to suit our needs. From start to finish, deployment only took about 3 months.”

“It’s been a huge win for our field sales team,” says Beeland Nielsen, director of commercial leadership at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United, Inc. “On average, reps are saving about 90 minutes each day just on order entries. This is giving them more time to follow through on our best merchandising strategies and propose bigger sales to our customers. And we are just scratching the surface on data analytics. If we can keep solving executional gaps and opportunities, the revenue-generation opportunity is incredible.”

Donna Tellam, Spring’s vice president of customer & partner solutions, explains that Spring spends a lot of time talking to consumer goods companies in the ongoing development of their solution roadmap. “We don’t just talk to field reps; we shadow them as they do their work in the field. We also talk to people in the back office to really understand their needs. We spent a lot of time with the CONA bottlers to make sure that we understood all of their specific pain points.”

“We’ve developed our solution for forward-thinking companies who are looking for end-to-end optimization,” says Spring’s CEO Conor Keane. “We believe it gives them a significant head start over competitors. Seeing our application being put to work in the Coca-Cola system is a validation of our roadmap and strategy.”

“We’ve succeeded in enabling next-generation retail execution,” says CONA Services CEO Reinhard Meister. “It’s opened up our options and given us a platform to build toward even greater future success.”

Spring Mobile Solutions (www.springglobal.com) provides mission-critical, cloud-based mobile applications that help consumer goods companies increase field-team productivity and grow sales revenue. With offices in the United States, Latin America and Europe, Spring offers large CPG companies a powerful tool for supporting growth.

CONA Services, LLC (www.conaservices.com) equips Coca-Cola bottlers with the state-of-the-art technology they need to offer superior service to their customers. By defining a common set of processes, standards and solutions, CONA Services helps Coca-Cola bottlers across North America drive business innovation and achieve a superior customer experience.