Eleven bottlers.
One shared brain.

A bottle of Coca-Cola looks reassuringly simple. Getting it onto a shelf requires a less tidy arrangement: production schedules, warehouse stock, truck space, invoices, and a shopkeeper who would rather spend the morning selling drinks than chasing an order. Now multiply that arrangement across independent bottling companies. The label stays the same. The systems behind it can become quite a conversation.

CONA Services exists inside that conversation. Its name expands to Coke One North America. The Atlanta company runs a common technology platform for participating Coca-Cola bottlers in the United States and Canada. Its purpose sounds modest: help those businesses operate. The complication, and the interesting bit, is that its customers also own and govern it.

The customers own the roadmap

Six large bottlers formed CONA Services in 2016. Its current roster includes Coca-Cola Consolidated, UNITED, Coke Florida, Reyes, Swire and Coca-Cola Canada, among 11 partners. Their territories and local customers differ. Many underlying jobs repeat. Every business needs dependable information about products, orders, inventory and money. Building those capabilities together offers a way to share the effort.

There is a longer family history. The international Coke One program began in 2006; a North American adaptation followed in 2013. CONA’s own history says the subsequent rollout reached more than 500 locations. The appeal was coordination: common processes and data standards could travel across businesses whose relationships with stores remained local.

That arrangement places CONA between an internal IT department and an outside technology supplier. It has the shared scope of a services business, with owners who use what it builds. The distinction matters when priorities collide. A procurement improvement, a delivery change and an invoice problem all belong to people with a seat at the table.

The product range follows the bottler’s working day. Customer tools cover order capture and account management; supply-chain applications cover planning, production and delivery. Finance tools handle receivables, collections and credit, while HR applications support employees. Analytics ties information together. The value lies in connecting those jobs, so a decision in one department can use information created in another.

First, the workarounds

The clearest account of a problem comes from CONA itself. In a 2021 retrospective, its analytics team described query performance that repeated tuning could not fix. Some bottler teams began extracting data and combining it elsewhere. The common warehouse was losing the very activity it was supposed to support.

Further examination exposed storage expense, administrative overhead and awkward integration of non-SAP data. CONA and bottler leaders evaluated alternatives and selected Snowflake in November 2019. By the November 2021 account, the migration was 90 percent complete. The goal included giving local teams more freedom to build reporting while retaining a common foundation.

There is a useful management clue here. A workaround can be evidence of an unmet need. When users keep carrying data out of a system, another training session may accomplish very little. CONA’s account suggests that listening to the workaround helped clarify the buying criteria: capability, cost, performance and flexibility.

A weekend earned over two years

Another bottleneck lived between teams. SUSE’s case study describes SAP system builds involving Unix, Windows, networking, SAP specialists and cloud staff. A missed step or departing colleague could delay the work. Builds took three to four weeks. CONA worked with Microsoft and SUSE on deployment automation; the reported build time fell to three to four hours, with build costs reduced by at least 60 percent.

CONA moved all 11 participating bottlers from SAP ECC to S/4HANA on the weekend beginning April 19, 2024. Its announcement records more than two years of preparation. Bottlers executed over 38,000 acceptance test cases across three cycles. That work identified 3,135 defects and closed 3,109 during those cycles. The figures describe testing, rather than a promise of flawless software.

“It did not go smoothly because of magic but because of the hard work”

Francesco Quinterno · CONA’s 2024 cutover announcement

The detail worth copying is the rehearsal. CONA says dry runs prepared teams for the cutover, and low incident volumes allowed some intensive support calls to wind down early. Standardization supplied the destination. Testing supplied a credible way to get there.

The store gets a simpler screen

For a restaurant or convenience store, the visible result can be myCoke. CONA announced its refreshed platform in September 2024, serving more than 220,000 customer outlets. On web or mobile, customers could order products, pay invoices, raise service requests and obtain support. Those are small, necessary transactions that accumulate into a working relationship.

The rollout involved bottler working groups and steering committees, a Digital Office, payment technology from Fiserv, and implementation partners including CloudGaia, CoreFlex and Collective Insights. More than 500,000 customer emails preceded migration. A checkout screen may look compact. The organizational work required to put it there rarely is.

A real bill. A useful bargain.

Shared infrastructure still has a bill. Coca-Cola Consolidated disclosed $12.8 million in CONA service fees for the first half of 2026. That is one member’s expense for system access and related services. It gives the arrangement financial substance without pretending to be a universal subscription price.

For another business considering this model, the boundary is compatibility. Sharing makes sense when enough operational problems repeat and participants will accept common standards. It becomes harder when owners want incompatible processes or cannot agree on priorities. That is an inference from CONA’s structure, and a reason its bottling expertise matters as much as its software partners.

It also requires people who can keep that agreement alive. CONA publishes a network of business advisory councils covering areas such as supply chain, finance, procurement and master data. The list is a reminder that maintaining shared software involves continuing negotiation. A common platform needs somewhere for disagreements to go.

The company’s October 2026 hackathon offered a fitting closing scene: six teams working on problems including merchandiser visits and off-day deliveries. Those are the unglamorous details on which a bottler’s day depends. CONA’s proposition is to solve more of them together, leaving each bottler better equipped to serve the shop down the road.