Coca-Cola Andina Builds Data Lake on AWS, Increases Analytics Productivity by 80% for More Data-Driven Decision-Making

Coca-Cola Andina produces and distributes products licensed by The Coca-Cola Company within South America. The company has 17,500 employees and a presence in part of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and the whole of Paraguay, serving more than 267,000 customers and refreshing 54 million consumers.

“We understand that Coca-Cola Andina's vision goes beyond obtaining profitability, and that the benefits we generate must reach all of society, both for current and future generations. We are sure that, through innovation and incorporation of new capabilities, such as data lakes and analytics, we will achieve sustainable growth for the benefit of our customers, consumers, and the communities where we operate," says Miguel Angel Peirano, executive vice president of Coca-Cola Andina.

As a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, Coca-Cola Andina has a direct relationship with customers and consumers. "Our customers are our company’s partners, since they are a fundamental part of the distribution and sales chain. That is why we want them to grow with us—for them to have the necessary stock and to offer good service to consumers", explains Luis Valderrama, regional CTO of Coca-Cola Andina.

In fact, the CPG industry generates massive volumes of data, often stored in different systems which are cut off from one other, making it difficult to analyze the information.
Coca-Cola Andina uses SAP as a transactional core with data on customers, sales, products, etc. It also has RPA systems and B2B solutions with which it can engage with these customers. To ensure a more personalized and social experience, the company uses its CRM and smartphone applications, as well as other methods, to interact with consumers. Both cases have a common concept: data.

The company brings the data closer to its partners to enable its teams and partners to make decisions based on it. "However, having data in different systems or traditional data warehouses made it very complex," says Valderrama.

Coca-Cola Andina’s challenge was to collect all relevant information on the company, customers, logistics, coverage, and assets together within a single accurate source. This led the company to decide to build a data lake.

Coca-Cola Andina wanted an architecture that was easy to access, with reliable data and no limits on storage, response, or processing capacity. "This was the layer that would allow us to unite our traditional world with the digital world, in addition to making it possible to bring cognitive technologies, such as artificial vision, machine learning, natural language processing, voice processing, robotics, etc. to the business," Valderrama says. 

The company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the provider of all the technology and architecture for its data lake. "AWS was the cloud solution that would meet all the expectations defined for our data lake," says Valderrama, adding that the architecture needed to include a platform as a service (PaaS) to allow solutions to be developed and dismantled quickly and economically, and that he was happy with the decision because the company has a culture of learning by doing.

The data lake became the single source of data generated by SAP ERP, CSV files, and legacy databases. Coca-Cola Andina was able to implement a technical architecture that covers the whole spectrum from data entry to exploitation, through analytics and machine learning tools.

The data lake uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to securely store its raw data for analytics, machine learning, and other applications.  It also uses services such as Amazon QuickSight and Amazon Athena in the consumer layer; cognitive technologies, such as Amazon Personalize and Amazon SageMaker, for machine learning; AWS Lambda for serverless compute; Amazon DynamoDB as a key-value and document database; and Amazon Redshift to create data warehouses when necessary. "The architecture we built on AWS fulfills the expectation of having a data lake based on a PaaS," says Valderrama.

To ensure the best processes, and the best use and integration of these solutions, the company had the support of the AWS Professional Services team. “During 2020, Coca-Cola Andina worked hard to incorporate data lake and analytics knowledge shared by AWS Professional Services, managing to generate the tools and capabilities to become a “data-driven decision” company, focus on improving the experience and relationship with its consumers and customers, and generae productivity and efficiency in its processes,” says Nicolás Nazario Condado, digital transformation manager for Coca-Cola Andina. 

Additionally, as part of the overall digital strategy, Coca-Cola Andina implemented a wider cloud infrastructure on AWS, in addition to the data lake, and began developing other digital products and solutions to address various strategic verticals for customers, consumers, and internal processes.

Coca-Cola Andina has created a multidisciplinary team with partners from the business and technology world to combine knowledge and had training provided by AWS Professional Services. 

With the new cloud structure and more than 300 hours of training provided by AWS, Coca-Cola Andina acquired the necessary capabilities to become a data-driven decision company, increasing productivity and efficiency in decision-making across the different areas of the business.

In fact, the cloud infrastructure allowed Coca-Cola Andina to improve and implement new products and services, customizing the different value propositions for its more than 260,000 customers. This led to an increase in the company’s revenue by improving the efficiency of promotions, reducing stock shortages—and thus improving the shopping experience of its customers, and increasing the productivity of the analysis team by 80 percent. Coca-Cola Andina managed to ingest more than 95 percent of the data from its different areas of interest, which allows it to build excellence reports in just a few minutes and implement advanced analytics.

With all the resources and functionality that the data lake enables, Coca-Cola Andina ensures its partners and customers have access to reliable information for making strategic decisions for the business. In this way, the company united the traditional world with the digital world, allowing teams and partners to make decisions based on data.

Coca-Cola Andina plans to develop new applications and solutions on its AWS infrastructure. These include self-management applications, dynamic pricing strategies, and machine learning models, among others.

Coca-Cola Andina plans to develop new applications and solutions on its AWS infrastructure. These include self-management applications, dynamic pricing strategies, and machine learning models, among others.