Coca-Cola enterprises

Keeping track of commercial contracts

The biggest global beverage company, Coca-Cola® is also one of the most powerful worldwide brands. The iconic red and white logo is recognised by 94 per cent of the planet’s population. Coca-Cola has been on sale in France since 1919 and, today, the country is one of the company’s primary markets in Europe.

Coca-Cola Enterprises offers retailers a wide range of branded point-of-sale equipment such as refrigerated cabinets, table-top coolers and post-mix equipment, provided and maintained under contract. These agreements used to be issued from seven regional sales offices, with signed documents held locally in paper form. Those records needed to be consolidated and made more readily accessible from any location in France.

Bernard Ollivier, Senior Manager of Business Processes, says: “We could have simply centralised the paper files, but that would have taken up a lot of space and made finding documents even more challenging. Instead we chose to create a digital archive, but we needed a company that could scan and index the contracts for us.”

Standardising digital files

Iron Mountain® has a long history of working with Coca-Cola. In France, it has provided the company with off-site records management services since 1998. It currently manages an archive of 12,000 boxes of documents.

“The scanning project needed careful management and scheduling to allow continued access to contracts with minimum delay,” says Bernard Ollivier. “We were confident Iron Mountain had the resources and credentials for a great job.”

The project involved the collection of contract documents from the seven regional sales offices for transport to the Iron Mountain scanning centre. The contracts didn’t follow a common format. That added complexity. Those variations meant adjustments during scanning to standardise the appearance of the digital files.

Assured quality and accuracy

The scans were loaded on the Iron Mountain document management portal so that Coca-Cola Enterprises could download them to its own system. The master contract documents were then shipped for off-site Iron Mountain storage.

Assuring service during the transition was vitally important. Bernard Ollivier explains: “We never know when we might need to refer to a contract. We had a service level agreement with Iron Mountain so that everyone knew how long it would take for a digital file to be available once the physical file had been collected.” There was even a scan-on-demand service to maintain access to any designated contract within 24 hours.

The whole project took around six months. In total some 114,000 contract documents comprising almost half-a-million pages were scanned. “The quality and accuracy of the scans were excellent,” confirms Bernard Ollivier, “and Iron Mountain completed the task on time and on budget.”

Less paper, more business benefits

By scanning customer contracts, Coca-Cola Enterprises has moved to a far more efficient paperless environment. Rather than having to search for the physical contract documents, access is now online and almost immediate.

Records are accessible by customer name, address, contract number or equipment serial number, so contract enquiries can be dealt with in real time. And with records accessible from any location the response time to any enquiry is optimised.

Moreover, with Iron Mountain storing hard copies off-site, Coca-Cola Enterprises hasn’t had to make provision for document storage space, saving a considerable sum on accommodation. Bernard Ollivier concludes: “Iron Mountain did a great job. The project was a tremendous success - very well managed and executed.”