CONA Services transforms Bottler HR systems

CONA Services was established by Coca-Cola Bottlers, for Coca-Cola Bottlers. The company objective is to support the North American Bottlers in what they do best – producing and selling Coca-Cola products and delivering happiness to their customers.

The team provides a common set of data, processes, and solutions, and eight Bottlers asked CONA to also support their HR platform solution. They wanted to align business processes, have the ability to lift and shift customizations from their legacy platform, add automations, and consolidate instances across all participating Bottlers. This was an opportunity for system alignment to reduce complexity, save money, and improve user adoption.

Driving transformation

Each Bottler had its own instance of SAP SuccessFactors with different processes and modules. Several Bottlers were experiencing payroll issues and there was not enough time to provide sufficient support for recruiting and onboarding challenges. An HR Steering Committee was formed and governing principles were established as they began to identify necessary functionality to deliver an improved user experience.

CONA also wanted to reduce costs and system errors and implement repeatable practices, all within a platform that could scale for future demands.

Named CONA HR 2.0, the modernized HR platform moved the eight Bottlers onto a single instance of SAP SuccessFactors hosted in the cloud. This positioned the Bottlers to automatically take advantage of future SAP HR innovations. CONA chose long-time partner Capgemini for the implementation.

A one-team approach

“From the beginning of the initiative, we had a one-team approach,” says Petra Romano, Chief Product Officer Enabling Functions, CONA Services. “That means we collaborated as Bottlers, including their shared business services organization, SAP, Capgemini, and CONA as one team, all here to support one common goal.”

The project plan strategically balanced the Bottler implementations into waves. Development was accelerated in each wave based on previous evidence and learnings. Romano says a significant differentiator for the success of CONA 2.0 was engaging business executives from the beginning.

CONA HR 2.0 was planned for an 18-month timeline, from requirements gathering to the first Bottlers going live. Even when the pandemic restrictions moved everyone to remote work in the middle of the build, it was still delivered on time and on budget. Now CONA HR 2.0 supports more than 53,000 employees across eight Bottlers.

Recruiting innovation

“What drives the need of our continued transformation is the great need to swiftly onboard new talent into the Bottling organizations,” says Romano. “We are doing this in two ways. We just recently implemented a new technology called Paradox, an SAP partner. It is an AI solution, a digital assistant for recruiting. In addition, we are also working on a custom onboarding app for improving the candidate experience, using as a backbone SuccessFactors’ ONB 2.0.”

This will make it easier for candidates to connect with Bottlers on opportunities. Job seekers can now send a text to apply, for example, and an automatic AI-driven response will handle simple tasks such as scheduling interviews, thereby reducing manual labor. The expectation for the custom onboarding application is not only improved candidate experience but also reduced drop out quotes, as well as reduced follow up efforts from the Bottler teams to get the onboarding tasks completed. It is key that onboarding processes be simple and easy for candidates, since the largest population of Bottler employees are frontline or deskless workers.

Scaling for growth

The HR Steering Committee continues to be active and to make decisions on the roadmap going forward. Ultimately, the solution was designed to build upon itself, and deliver value and stability to the business while minimizing manual work and unnecessary costs. “Now that we have the basics right, we can truly focus on supporting the Bottlers with business growth, getting talent in the door, and having employees stay,” says Romano.

“Capgemini has a great pool of experienced resources. We have an excellent program manager who not only supported the 18-month project but continues to work with us to help maximize the benefits of the existing platform and explore and implement new technologies to drive additional business value.”

Petra Romano
Chief Product Officer, Enabling Technologies
CONA Services