An excerpt of Mathew Chacko's, Coca‐Cola's director of enterprise architecture, interview with Sam Ransbotham, an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review guest editor for the Data and Analytics Big Idea Initiative is given below.
Coke is the world's largest beverage company, with more than 500 brands and 3,500 products sold worldwide. In 2013, the company had $46.9 billion in net operating revenues, and a net income of $8.6 billion. It has about 250 bottling partners with 900 bottling plants, and employs over 700,000 system associates worldwide.
Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of marrying all these external datasets from your bottlers? That seems like a particular challenge at Coke, where there's this huge infrastructure of “data middlemen,” for lack of a better term.
Chacko: Well, point‐of‐sale data, scan data, is actually very big. Our commercial department really wants to have good information about that from one set of customers so that they can take that information and go to other customers and say, “Hey, we have this other customer that did these kinds of campaigns with this kind of strategy, and they were able to see this lift.”
Our team wants to go to our customers with real numbers. It's important for us when we go to our customers to be able to give them fact‐based information. We also want to take in things ...
