- Category Group:
- Technology Categories
- Category:
- Most Innovative Technology Team of the Year - All Other Industries
- Organization Name:
- Coca Cola Icecek
- Organization Description:
Coca-Cola İçecek (CCI) is a Turkish multinational beverage company, part of Türkiye's Anadolu Group, which operates in Türkiye, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Syria. CCI produces, distributes and sells sparkling and still beverages of The Coca-Cola Company and Monster Energy Beverage Corporation
Core+ Transformation: Powering the Future of Distribution
Coca-Cola İçecek (CCI), a Türkiye-based multinational operating across 12 countries and serving 600 million people. Company relies on distributors for 80% of its sales volume that are the backbone of CCI's route-to-market.
By placing customers at the heart of its value chain, in 2024 CCI Digital's Technology team organized strategy sessions both with internal and external stakeholders to anticipate the evolving needs. Insights indicated that CCI's legacy system was rather inflexible and slow to adapt.
Hard-coded rules delayed time-to-market, single-window limitations hindered productivity and governance gaps raised security concerns.
It became evident that a future-proof, agile, and intelligent platform was vital for informed decision making and delivering one stop experience. It is therefore agreed that an innovative platform that may carry on omnichannel experience and conduct predictive analysis would replace the legacy distribution management system.
In 2024, CCI Digital Technology initiated Core+ Transformation project. Migration to a cloud-native, API-first architecture with AI-driven adaptability is designed in three phases:
- Phase 1: Innovative Architectural Design & Future Proof Platform Development
- Phase 2: Deployment of the New Platform across the footprint with 'as is functionalities'
- Phase 3: Turning Core+ into a 'One Stop Shop' Experience with Integration of AI & APIs
Key Driver behind Success: Agile Team Structure & Working Culture
To ensure the smooth planning and execution of the digital transformation project, the CCI Digital Team implemented an innovative and agile project management model as the key enabler for fostering cross-functional collaboration, integrating diverse expertise and aligning both corporate and customer needs across all phases of the project.
Core+ Digital Transformation Project Team is formed in 2024 and it is structured around 4 agile squads with representatives from Technology, Distribution, Finance, Sales, and Marketing departments. In the first phase of the project, teams gathered requirements, identified the architectural design principles and developed the system. Today, we are in the second phase where country deployments take place and project is governed around the same structure. Nevertheless, Squad Leads invite representatives from country operations for deployment phases.
Reporting to The Core+ Project Management Office, The Project Team operates around an innovative hybrid agile delivery model that combines the adaptability of agile methodologies with the structured discipline of waterfall practices. This approach was deliberately chosen to address the complexity and scale of a multinational digital transformation program. The project is governed by the program management office while Scrum Masters execute agile delivery by coaching teams, removing impediments and ensuring effective collaboration.
In the beginning of the project, agile principles have been identified to be most suitable for Core+ platform development, feature delivery and user experience. Key agile practices such as daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives fostered transparency and accountability across cross-functional teams spread across multiple countries. By integrating DevOps principles including automated testing and real-time monitoring, the project accelerated deployment cycles while maintaining high quality standards.
Squad Leads carried on customer workshops with distributors and continuously received feedback from team members from business lines to validate assumptions and prioritize functionality based on real business needs. Insights gathered from these engagements directly informed sprint backlogs.
Other foundational components of the project such as end-to-end process identification, regulatory alignment and core data model definition required a more structured waterfall methodology. For Steering Committee members and project sponsors, overseeing the project through waterfall milestones has provided greater clarity. This approach therefore has been offering a balance amongst needs of different stakeholders without sacrificing innovation at execution level.
The hybrid project set up has introduced a new way of working to CCI and has been inspiring the organization on how cross-functional teams bringing the expertise from 12 different countries drive breakthrough results in technology innovation