This thought leadership article was originally posted on LinkedIn by Dennis Lacey, VP, Business Development at OnActuate.
May 8 is National Have a Coke Day. For the past 100 years, Coca-Cola has made products that consumers love while focusing on building a more sustainable future.
Consumers are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of the products they purchase. Beverage bottlers must take steps to reduce their carbon footprint, minimize waste, and use sustainable materials to meet environmental regulations and shifting consumer habits. In fact, a recent study revealed that 66% of consumers said they consider sustainability when making a purchase.
Reducing your environmental impact involves looking at all your operations and finding opportunities to improve sustainability while gaining other benefits. Microsoft Azure Cloud Services supports sustainability by unifying data intelligence, and building a sustainable infrastructure that serves to reduce the environmental impact of multiple systems operating on separate instances globally. OnActuate has partnered with some of the world’s biggest brands to migrate to the cloud, allowing them to meet their project objectives while gaining sustainability benefits.
The role of technology in sustainable bottling practices
Technology has been leveraged to drive environmental initiatives for many years such as eliminating the need for physical paper and storage through methods like e-signatures and digital barcodes. New technologies have made access to data even easier to help drive sustainability through:
- Transportation optimization. Transportation automation optimizes the routing and delivery by fleet or carrier. This allows bottlers to find the best possible routing to reduce fuel consumption, thus decreasing their carbon footprint.
- Azure Cloud Services and analytics. Unifying data across the business by leveraging Azure Cloud Services allows you to consolidate all systems. This provides efficiencies including reducing resource consumption. Enhanced data analytics can help better manage inventory and raw materials by providing advanced, comprehensive analytics on current usage as well as insights on predictive factors.
- Supply chain process automation. Lean optimization from demand planning, through production, inventory and logistics/shipping serves further to reduce waste from ‘rush’ orders and carrying excess inventory. This drives sustainability because of transportation cost, leading to less fuel and reduced carbon footprint.
Sustainability in action
Coca-Cola bottlers utilizing our Microsoft Dynamics 365 extended solution have reaped the benefits of automation and data to drive sustainability. Here’s a snapshot at how these organizations are making an impact:
- Diamond Beverages (DBPL) has been optimizing operations through lowering raw material inputs, thus reducing transportation, waste, and carbon emissions. This has been effective by removing the excess from the packaging while adhering to more stringent design guidelines. Through their automation and related initiatives, DBPL was able to carry a lower-than-average direct goods inventory, reducing the need for raw materials such as sugar cane. This decreases fuel consumption used to grow and transport these products.
- Ludhiana Beverages (LBPL) unified all their systems by moving to Azure Cloud. The move eliminated the need for multiple systems in several locations. This reduced their carbon footprint by reducing consumption of energy and less need of physical space.
Promoting sustainability supports positive change
Consumers are supporting companies that make real positive changes to combat climate change. Companies that meet or go above the regulatory requirements are winning over governments and consumers. This change is going to take a collective effort from individuals, small businesses, and large corporations to change the world – so we can continue to celebrate fun holidays like Have a Coke Day for decades to come.
