The Digital Leader

2Taking the First Bite

What can the first “bite” in making a digital business actually achieve? Here's what several pioneers found in successfully tackling different parts of their value chain.

Turning a Chaotic Data Flow into a Single Source of Truth for Sharper Strategies

For Coca‐Cola HBC, a sprawling Coca‐Cola bottler based in Switzerland, the issue was a lack of visibility into various parts of the organization, which made it hard to gauge relative performance and identify the best opportunities for growth. The company needed to build a complete, granular data system providing a holistic view of the company's far‐flung operations, what we call a single source of truth. The question was not just how to create a platform to assemble a large flow of data in one place but how to deploy digital tools that could quickly deliver insights leaders could use to improve their decision making on things such as capital allocation.

Coca‐Cola HBC is a data‐rich, highly complex business. It operates in 28 countries across three continents, from Ireland to Eastern Russia and south to Nigeria, regions filled with growing wealth and promise. But during a dinner I was having with Zoran Bogdanovic, the CEO, he mentioned his deep frustration over the kind of data that he and his leadership team had access to. It was not centrally organized, so it came in different formats and followed different standards. It did not necessarily measure the same things in the same way in different markets, ...