Case Study – Mobilizing the Coca-Cola Bottling Salesforce
Burnout. Fatigue. Turnover.
Bad, poorly designed software running on frustrating devices causes real business harm. As enterprise organizations assess potential innovative investments, improvements to business processes are often overlooked.
But the CIO at Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated (the nation’s largest independent marketer, producer and distributor of Coca-Cola Company products) had different designs. At CCBCC, the entire technology arm has decided that real, measurable innovation means making employees happier and more productive.
“The new iPad application saves me two to three hours a day.” – Clement McKinley | District Sales Manger | CCBCC
“Within Three Months, Sales Were Up.”
With the help of his IT members systematically embedded within the different business units around CCBCC, CIO Onyeka Nchege identified one particular company role constantly hamstrung by failed technology.
District Sales Managers (DSMs) for CCBCC are in the field 10-12 hours a day. After spending all day hopping in and out of the truck, most were forced to then spend another two to three hours that same night or next morning logging order data and customer requests.
In the office, the .NET application was slow and clunky. In the field, both problems were exaggerated when the software was used on laptops.
Onyeka and his team decided to enable the DSMs with iPads. And once they made that strategic decision — to give their salesforce devices that would improve their day — Onyeka had to make another one.
“Not only can you use it for work, but we encourage you to use it for personal [reasons].” – Onyeka Nchege | CIO | CCBCC
How Do You Make .NET Work On an iPad?
Like many large enterprises, CCBCC is mostly a Microsoft shop. And like many large enterprises, employees clamor for all manner of consumer devices — and most importantly — the consumer device experience.
“The client let us know they had been looking for someone internally, an iOS & .NET developer. Most developers know, that magical unicorn does not exist.”
At Method, our multi-disciplinary teams combine the best of both the open-source and enterprise worlds.
As businesses expect more functionality and flexibility from their technology investments, Method is helping companies integrate “best of breed” hardware and software.
“Software Development is Risky.”
After the initial technology audit of CCBCC’s existing infrastructure — but before Method wrote a line of new code we met several DSMs out in the field to document their daily processes.
More than just port over the .NET application, the Method design and product strategy teams uncovered myriad process shortcuts made possible by the iPad’s touchscreen. Even with an intended-from-the-start HTML5 build, hotspots, multi-finger touches, and inventive UI tricks were all employed to make sure CCBCC DSMs spent the least time necessary interacting with technology.
Stats at a Glance
Business Problem: Salesforce Productivity | Quality of Life Improvement
Target Users: District Sales Managers constantly in the field
Technologies Used: .NET | JSON | HTML5
Device Target: iPads for now | software is screen/device agnostic
Key Feature: seamless offline mode