Interview. ONDC is a bold initiative by the govt, says Coca-Cola’s Global Chief Information Officer

Coca-Cola has been on a transformation journey well before the pandemic. Technology and data are an integral part of our growth agenda and growth aspirations.

We are doing digitisation across the enterprise, across customers, and across all our consumers. In many cases, it may mean automating an existing process, or reducing the number of processes and making things simpler or making something smarter and more intelligent.

So for the enterprise, we migrated all our applications to the cloud. So you may hear the term cloud first. We are “cloud only.” That is a big difference, meaning we have no data centers, everything we have is on cloud. We are also focusing on transforming our systems and supply chains.

As a franchise system, we interact with a large number of bottlers around the world, a lot of data goes back and forth between us and them. We are closely looking at what data can unlock for us and leveraging it to bring predictability and insights to evolve our supply chains.

Consumers are always at the heart of all our decisions. So all our strategies are focused on making it easier for our consumers to access and consume our products.

Being a global company, we have to make sure that anything that we develop globally, can be scaled up quickly across our operations. Also, we may choose to accelerate some of those initiatives for a growth market like India.

For instance, in 2023, we will be upgrading our plants in India and around the region in terms of implementation of latest technologies that ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems have to offer.

India certainly is an important and integral part of our growth strategy. We do have a big portion of our talent base here. I think the initiatives that you recently see coming out of India, like the Open Network for Digital Commerce are very interesting.

I really want to applaud the government for coming up with this bold initiative that is going to truly democratise commerce in terms of how consumers interact with the products they consume on a daily basis. Something like this has not been done at this scale.

ONDC is focusing on being platform agnostic which is where the world is moving, where it doesn’t matter what the underlying technology is, as one is able to plug and play the various types of solutions in a Lego-like model to truly define the kind of experience you want for your end-customers.

So, we have several initiatives on the cards, as we plan to become part of it and see how ONDC evolves. We want to not only contribute but also learn from this initiative.

We absolutely pride ourselves on being highly innovative in every part of the business. We look at all emerging technologies with equal amounts of interest.

It’s always good to anchor yourself around solving real problems. So the focus has to be on what problem one is trying to solve rather than what technology one wants to use.

I believe the Indian government has made a lot of progress in terms of investments in infrastructure and networks and this helps accelerating the path to growth.

This benefits all local and global companies, including the Coca-Cola Company. Emerging countries also often leapfrog certain technologies that may have gone through a trial period in other parts of the world.