Happiest Minds Technologies, a digital transformation and IT solutions company, has successfully executed a digital transformation project for Coca Cola Bottling Company United for streamlining its order management with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate.
Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United) has a long history of supplying Coca-Cola products directly to retailers and restaurants. But when Coca-Cola introduced its new Freestyle vending machine, Coca-Cola United, a privately owned company that isn’t owned by Coca-Cola, was challenged to streamline its order and invoicing procedures. It rose to the occasion quickly, using Microsoft Power Automate robotic process automation (RPA). Coca-Cola United is advancing the strategic Freestyle initiative with process automation that matches the individuality and innovation that the product represents.
“While building this solution, we resurrected high-value strategic projects that we couldn’t tackle before because of the constraints of legacy apps. We feel empowered to take advantage of any future opportunities that the business provides us,” said Bob Means, Director, Business Solutions, Coca-Cola United.
The company faced two challenges as it explored solutions. “It was too costly to create APIs for our legacy applications like SAP and others, and we also had to navigate a third-party website,” explained Allan McDaniel, Manager, Development for BI and Master Data, Coca-Cola United. “We used Power Automate RPA bots to fill these gaps and automate the process.”
Desktop flows, in Power Automate, automate repetitive processes in Windows and web applications—a perfect fit for high-volume but mundane data entry and transfer. Coca-Cola United collaborated with Happiest Minds to create a master automated service agent they’ve dubbed ‘Asa,’ which consists of several bots. Built on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power Platform, ‘Asa’ uses Azure Key Vault to help secure and control passwords and other sensitive data, and it relies on Azure DevOps for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
The new, simplified process frees the dedicated CRM agent, allowing orders from all channels, such as inbound and outbound call center agents, field service sales representatives at customer sites, and via a customer self-service portal.
“We avoided having to hire 10 full-time employees. Better still, the existing CRM agent is now free to work on other projects,” said McDaniel.
“Our team collaborated well, and the synergies led to the deployment of one of a kind solution, leading to realization of business benefits for our customers,” said Huzefa Saifee, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Business Services, Happiest Minds.
Using Power Virtual Agents, Happiest Minds helped the company develop a bot that served as an intelligent front-end to the new solution. Power Automate was used to drive the entire process. And by interoperating with other Azure services, such as Azure Key Vault, the system was able to securely access both internal and external systems and orchestrate the entire order process, from purchase order to reconciliation, in SAP.
