CASE STUDY
THE COCA-COLA COMPANY
TRANSFORMS ITS GLOBAL
SUPPLY CHAIN WITH
CONNECTED LEARNING
We are changing the way
our industry builds talent.
-Scott Figura, Global Director of Productivity and
Operational Excellence at The Cola-Cola Company
CHALLENGE
Coca-Cola’s new CEO challenged the company to double the business
in ten years without doubling infrastructure or costs. This aggressive
goal came at a time when Coke’s supply chain was grappling with a
growing global challenge: access to water. These two urgent drivers made
revamping Coke’s supply chain management mindset a mission-critical
priority.
ACTION
To migrate Coca-Cola’s supply chain mindset, Scott Figura, Global
Director of Productivity & Operational Excellence, developed a residential
executive education program for top supply chain leaders with Georgia
Tech’s Scheller College of Business. But Coke also needed to train over
8,000 supply chain managers and front-line employees across the globe.
To reach these leaders, Figura invested in a virtual development solution
rooted in ‘connected learning’— an expert-led virtual learning experience
that is tied to relevant business challenges, integrated into real work, and
engineers collaborative problem solving by groups of learners. In Coke’s
case, virtual teams of leaders worked together on real supply-chain
improvement projects, supported by frameworks and tools delivered
online by subject matter experts and facilitators.
RESULT
Coca-Cola estimates that the projects undertaken as part of the connected
learning program have identified in excess of $25M in cost avoidance
and productivity enhancements, a return of roughly 15-to-1. The program
received a rating of 4.54 out of 5 from participants and garnered a 90%
completion rate. Coke now ranks #9 in Gartner’s “Supply Chain Top 25”
ratings, with the company’s investment in supply chain leadership cited as
a key factor in its success.
© 2014 CUX Inc 1
Vision, supply chain leaders need to think
broadly about end-to-end management
of the supply chain. According to Scott
Figura, Coca-Cola’s Global Director of
Productivity & Operational Excellence,
“We needed strong leaders, operational
excellence, capable people, and an
understanding of a holistic supply chain
to build our system capability.”
When Muhtar Kent became the CEO of
one of the world’s biggest companies—
Coca-Cola—in 2008, he set a goal that he
later described to the Harvard Business
Review as “not for the fainthearted.”
Kent’s plan, “2020 Vision,” called for the
organization to double its business in ten
years without doubling infrastructure or
costs. In the 2011 HBR interview, “Shaking
Things Up at Coca-Cola,” Kent said, “I felt
that we needed a vision, a shared picture
of success—both for us and for our bottling
partners.”
It was a daunting prospect. Coke is
one of the world’s largest employers,
encompassing a widely distributed
network of supply, production, bottling
and distribution facilities. Building a
better supply chain meant harnessing
and aligning the leadership of a vast and
diverse international workforce.
10 YEARS
without doubling infrastructure or cost
Imperatives of the 2020 Vision were to
support growth, protect Coke’s brands,
and ensure sustainability, both commercial
and environmental. Revamping the
supply chain was critical to the success
of each priority. And Coke’s supply chain
organization faced an additional challenge.
As the maker of products for which water
is the main ingredient, Coke is confronting
the fact that water is becoming scarcer
around the world due to population growth
and climate change. Beyond water-asingredient, volatility of water availability
creates other problems as well. Coke cites
the threat of drought and flooding on the
company’s supply of sugar cane and sugar
beets, as well as citrus for its fruit juices.
To support the emphasis on commercial
and environmental sustainability in 2020
CASE STUDY
Coke’s achievements are also
reflected in the 2013 Gartner
Supply Chain Top 25 ratings. Coke
now ranks at #9 worldwide, and the
report calls out Coke’s investment
in its supply chain leadership and
university partnership model as a
critical factor in its success.
Figura and Coke’s learning organization
realized they needed to redefine how the
company developed supply chain talent.
Although it had long focused on building
supply chain excellence in its managers,
the company needed to emphasize
strategic thinking, leadership and network
performance rather than task-level and
individual performance.
Complicating the matter further, a large
chunk of Coke’s supply chain workforce
will be retirement-eligible in the next five
to ten years and in undeveloped markets
the company needed to develop a base of
talent for the first time. “We didn’t have
the core foundation of knowledge that
we needed to drive our business forward,”
noted Figura, “so we had to keep pace to
replace existing talent and leadership; but
in emerging and growth areas, we had to
build new talent to support our expanding
business needs.” Adding to the pressure,
this new supply chain mindset had to be
realized in time to power the performance
expectations of the 2020 Vision.
THE CHALLENGE FOR THE LEARNING
ORGANIZATION: CASCADING
TRAINING DEEP INTO THE EXTENDED
SUPPLY CHAIN
Figura turned to Coke’s corporate
university and to Soumen Ghosh, the
academic faculty director at Georgia
Tech’s Scheller College of Business, Coke’s
longtime university partner. Ghosh helped
Coke develop face-to-face training for the
company’s top 200 leaders, a custom2
8,000
supply chain
managers &
front-line
employees
Everyone was comfortable with the
custom-designed face-to-face content,
but the challenge became cascading the
training throughout the Coca-Cola supply,
bottling and distribution system. Cost
aside, a residential program would be
unable to touch all the people necessary to
transform the supply chain mindset in the
required timeframe. Figura commented,
“The top-level program was more of a
traditional face to face—an immersion
program. We could do that with a small
group of leaders…but we couldn’t do that
as we moved down in the organization.
We had geographic constraints, language
constraints. We had to figure out a creative
way to reach a greater scale across all five
geographies that we operate in.”
Coke confronted the logistics of cascading
to more than 8,000 supply chain managers
and an even bigger population of front-line
employees scattered across the globe. How
could the company extend the training to
the next level of the organization and its
partners? And how could they do it in
a way that encouraged socialization of
material in groups as well as collaborative
development of holistic solutions rather
than just internalization of the content?
BUILDING A LEADERSHIP CULTURE
THROUGH CONNECTED LEARNING
Coke found their solution in an approach
called connected learning—an expert-led
virtual learning experience that is tied to
relevant business challenges, integrated
into real work, and engineers collaborative
problem solving by groups of learners. In
Coca-Cola’s case, a connected learning
approach had two key benefits over
standard e-learning. First, connected
learning orchestrated collaboration among
participants. This was important because
the terrain is complex and requires
collective problem solving and because
cross-silo collaboration is one of the key
competencies supply chain leaders need to
learn in order to capture efficiencies across
the system. Second, learners remained “in
their seats.” This was not only important
for time and cost reasons, but also because
leaders worked on real projects together
in real time, supported by development
throughout the experience.
CASE STUDY
designed executive education program to
develop the attributes needed to take on
the challenges of the 2020 Vision. Georgia
Tech is known for its supply chain expertise,
and best-in-class academic thinkers and
subject-matter experts partnered with key
supply chain leaders from across Coke’s
system to design the right content.
In short, rather than giving a few leaders
a one-time injection of knowledge, a
connected learning approach would help
build a lasting culture of leadership for
the organization. “A key benefit is that
this program complements our current
strategy,” said Figura. “It’s a means of
activating the right leadership mindset
and connecting people to collaborate
and meet goals that they couldn’t meet
as effectively other ways. It’s a source of
knowledge and inspiration for employees
to take their capabilities and perspectives
to new heights.”
“We had geographic constraints, language
constraints. We had to figure out a
creative way to reach a greater scale
across all five geographies that we operate
in.”
—Scott Figura
Participants in the program experienced
a highly produced blended learning
approach engineered to foster
engagement. Guided, paced cohorts
engaged with virtual content structured
specifically to foster collaboration and
learning on common business challenges.
Teams were challenged to learn new
frameworks focused on developing endto-end solutions to difficult supply chain
problems. Besides navigating a series of
interactive virtual coursework, participants
learned from Coca-Cola leaders and
Georgia Tech faculty, discussed successful
practices and ideas for performance
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One of the most important features of the
program is an “application” project. Each
cohort was split into smaller teams who were
tasked with defining a problem, proposing
a solution, testing their hypothesis, and
then presenting the results and the final
recommendation. The project needed to
address performance improvements around
quality, customer service or cost. This took
place throughout the program, both in
between and during the formal coursework.
One example of a project pertained to basic
assumptions in the bottling process. A
group identified a time-consuming activity
that necessitated significant downtime. It
was assumed that this step saved time later
in the process. The team experimented to
validate whether it actually saved time and
found that the process was not efficient
enough to justify itself. The blended design
of the program became important for what
happened next. The team shared this
insight with other learners who were able
to test and verify the same observation in
their production lines, creating an immediate
impact in productivity. That simple step
may not have happened if the program did
not provide the opportunity for sustained
collaboration only possible virtually.
ROLLING OUT THE PROGRAM AND
MEASURING RESULTS: A 15-TO-1
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Although it is still scaling up, Coke’s new
global, scalable supply chain leadership
development program is already very
successful by several measures. “We’re
really encouraged by what we’re seeing,”
says Figura. With 304 leaders and 224
managers having completed the program,
Figura reports that projects undertaken as
part of the connected learning program
have identified in excess of $25M in cost
avoidance and productivity enhancements.
Eventually the middle management program
will reach Coke’s approximately 8,000
CASE STUDY
improvement, reflected on transferring key
ideas to their work, and developed plans
that applied new knowledge and skills.
Most importantly, cohorts were grouped
strategically to allow collaboration both
vertically along the supply chain and
horizontally to gain a global perspective.
Th e fo r m a l d eve l o p m e n t p ro g ra m
was situated within a Virtual Learning
Community (VLC) platform where
participants can share ideas in between
formal development experiences.
$99M
in cost
avoidance &
productivity
enhancements
operational leaders at their 1,000 facilities
around the world. The application projects
have generated an average 15-to-1 return. “It’s
a simple calculation between the investment
of the tuition, plus putting that student in
the class, and then the financial return that
they achieve coming out of the completion
of the project.”
“We needed strong leaders, operational
excellence, capable people, and an
understanding of a holistic supply chain to
build our system capability.”
—Scott Figura
Figura particularly values the communities
of practice that he has seen spring up
around the program so far in the informal
Virtual Learning Community (VLC) part of
the platform. New connections have been
fostered among supply chain leaders, creating
valuable bridges across Coke’s global supply
chain network. “One of the things we really
wanted to accomplish through this program
was to connect people with content, and
people with people,” notes Figura. “One
of the consequences of that approach has
really been sharing the diversity of thought.
We have people from different organizations,
different geographies, sharing their
experiences and practices and developing
new ideas and broadening people’s vision,
which is really exciting because it brings up
the entire organization to that desired level
of performance.” He says he also appreciates
the “broad accessibility” of the connected
learning product, “at work, at home, on
iPhone, iPad.”
From a participant perspective, the
experience is engaging. Ninety percent
completion rates and an average evaluation
score of 4.54 on a 5-point scale suggest
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that the program is creating engagement
in addition to business outcomes. Coke’s
commitment to supply chain leadership has
been recognized in Gartner’s 2013 “Supply
Chain Top 25” ratings. Coke now ranks at #9
worldwide, and the report calls out Coke’s
investment in its supply chain leadership
and university partnership model as a critical
factor in its success. Additionally, Coke was
recently named one of ELearning! Magazine’s
Top 100 on the strength of its supply chain
management program.
“At the beginning of our journey, we’ve
already hit a global home run.”
—Scott Figura
REFERENCES
Ignatius, A. “Shaking Things Up at Coca-Cola:
An Interview with Muhtar Kent,” Harvard
Business Review, 2011.
Davenport, C. “Industry awakens to threat of
climate change,” New York Times, January
23, 2014.
The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2013.
<https://www.gartner.com/doc/2493115/
gartner-supply-chain-top->
“At the beginning of our journey, we’ve
already hit a global home run,” says Figura.
“We’re building relationships and onboarding
partnerships, driving business improvements
in growth areas and getting the return on
investment back into the business. We are
changing the way our industry builds talent.”
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