Coca-Cola Israel is one company that appreciates the value of efficient production and maximum uptime. With over 2,000 workers, several highly advanced manufacturing lines, and an extremely demanding production schedule, the Israeli firm really means it when it says “every second counts.”
So when Ness Technologies offered Coca-Cola Israel, formally known as the Central Bottling Company (CBC), the opportunity to improve its production process by acquiring Object Manager, a powerful add-on tool to SAP systems, it was easy for the leading beverage maker to say “yes.”
“We were very satisfied with our SAP ERP system from the time we bought it in 2002,” says Hadasa Nadler, Development Manager at Coca-Cola Israel. “But fairly quickly we discovered that by leaving the transport management process in the hands of one individual, we were creating a severe bottleneck throughout the company. When Ness showed us how Object Manager makes it possible to grant transport permission to dozens of employees based on attributes, we realized this was just what we needed.”
A Streamlined Process
Designed as a SAP-centric tool, Object Manager enables administrators to easily create and configure a complete permission, notification and transport approval hierarchy – one of the many ways it streamlines the transport process. “With over 25 workers now empowered to send transports and not needing to wait for one person to move things along, they are far more productive than ever before,” Nadler says. At the same time, Object Manager automates Coca-Cola Israel’s transport management process in real time, leading to far more efficient transport activity with fewer errors.
And if that wasn’t enough to convince Coca-Cola Israel about the value of Object Manager, the software’s rollback functionality, which enables workers to undo any transport on demand, most certainly was. “Object Manager is unique in that it allows us to revert back immediately to the status before the incorrect transport was made. After using the rollback feature just one time, we knew the tool was a worthwhile investment.”
A Good Recommendation
The project’s success was also enhanced due to the start-to-finish involvement of Ness, SAP’s exclusive distributor in Israel. The Israeli IT and outsourcing firm initially sold the SAP system to Coca-Cola Israel in 2002, after which it implemented and further developed it. “We have maintained a solid relationship with Ness ever since we bought the SAP system,” Nadler says. “The company has provided good support and service, and has been very easy to work with. So when Ness recommended Object Manager to us, after having implemented it at several local sites, we were prepared to consider it seriously.”
The fact that Coca-Cola Israel brought in Object Manager some two years after having acquired the SAP ERP system presented no problems for the firm. Ness seamlessly implemented the tool within just two weeks, while Coca-Cola Israel personnel were brought up to speed quickly after a very short learning curve. “Object Manager is highly intuitive, and our staff was able to start working with it immediately after implementation,” Nadler says.
But that doesn’t mean Nadler would not have “rolled back” the clock if possible. “Ideally, buying Object Manager together with the SAP ERP system would have made the most sense, since we would have benefited from day one.”
A Better Bottom Line
Those benefits for Coca-Cola Israel have been great. In addition to the granting of transport permissions according to attributes and rollback, Nadler notes that the company has taken advantage of several other Object Manager features: report generation, which can drill down to details such as history, attributes and destination; cluster transporting, which bundles a group of transports into a single cluster that can be imported with a single approval process; and client comparison, which enables users to generate reports comparing data among clients at a granular level that can then be used as a transport for client synchronization and transport planning.
But that’s not all. Israel Ptashnik, CIO at Coca-Cola Israel, says that since implementing Object Manager, the company has improved both worker productivity and overall production. At the same time, the beverage firm recorded an extremely rapid return on investment (ROI) of just a few months. “Object Manager clearly has been a successful purchase for us,” he says.
And more than a year after Object Manager has become part of the Coca-Cola Israel IT infrastructure, Ptashnik can’t conceive of life without the software. “Object Manager is a tool that helps us day in, day out,” he says. “It is a fixture in our company, and our staff has become fully accustomed to it. At this stage, it’s hard for me to imagine not using Object Manager.”
About Coca-Cola
The Central Bottling Company (CBC) holds the exclusive franchise for Coke in Israel. The privately-owned company is responsible for manufacturing, marketing and distributing Coca-Cola company products, including Nestea, Fanta and Sprite, throughout Israel.
Download Coca-Cola Success Story (PDF)
