The Coca-Cola Company is a great producer of non-alcoholic beverages, which in the era of high technologies widely develops and uses the information technologies for better collaboration and relationships within the employees, partners and customers worldwide. Realizing the significance of in-time information the company provided many IT applications for staying in touch with the company’s bottlers all around the world. Communication became the core element for further innovations. Provision of knowledge network systems and different software for controlling the working process of the company Coca-Cola managed the connection with customers. It is due to the social networks, such as Facebook, and official websites (Laudon & Laudon, 2009, p. 445).
Coca-Cola relates its goals’ fulfillment to both knowledge and collaboration management for the reason of strong influence from the side of competitors. Moreover, the needs of time declare the significance of innovative software and applications for better promotion of goods and services throughout the company’s spheres. It can be shown on the example of one model called “Coke One” based on “6.0 SAP’s ERP platform for supporting 650 business processes common to all bottlers” (Laudon & Laudon, 2009, p. 445).
Coca-Cola successfully uses knowledge management for outlining its business model and strategy. A healthy concern and other factors are implemented today by the company in new products for people with some limitations in health. Thus, the versatile complex of different services inside the company’s personnel worldwide tends to promote suggestions of employees from bottler companies to parent company. Laudon & Laudon (2009) in this respect note: “Innovation Framework allowed managers and personnel in disparate areas of the company and various regions (finance, legal, marketing, R&D) to view the practices that made it successful in other countries, and apply those concepts to future products” (p. 445).
The relationships with bottlers are important for Coca-Cola due to many reasons. One of them is maintaining of constructive relations every now and then. Also collaboration by means of information technologies will fasten the process of innovative implementation. Furthermore, the company takes into account the suggestions of employees by means of collaboration via social networks and different software, such as IBM Content Manager, for example (Laudon & Laudon, 2009). Another touch of the company considered the use of Microsoft applications, such as: SharePoint Online, LiveMeeting, or Office Communications Server Online (Laudon & Laudon, 2009). For the purpose to standardize the way of Coke’s communication the senior management of parent company fostered Project Scale (Laudon & Laudon, 2009).
The prospects of the Coca Cola Company for future development of the relations presupposes the deeper foster in information sharing within the bottler companies by means of last updated software and high-tech devices as well. This will help the company to improve current ability to impact on customers due to provision of needful information in time. On this stage Coke elaborates the cooperation with major software companies as well as with management teams throughout the area of Coca-Cola’s influence. Huge amounts of money spent for innovative technologies and their development and implementation in the company is a great background to think of good perspectives. In this case Laudon & Laudon note: “Coke’s investment in innovation and collaboration should stand the company in good stead in the years to come” (p. 446).
References
Laudon, K. C., and Laudon J. P. (2009) Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm. Ed. 11 New Jersey: Pearson Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River.