Coke One North America accelerates real-time SAP insights for 35,000 users

“With Fivetran, we’ve eliminated bottlenecks and errors, accelerated insights, and equipped our bottlers with the real-time data they need to run their businesses more effectively. It’s a critical foundation for smarter, faster decisions across the Coca-Cola system.”
— David McClure, Chief Data Officer at CONA

Coke One North America (CONA) is the IT backbone for 11 of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers across the U.S. and Canada. As the shared services provider, CONA manages core enterprise systems for partners responsible for over $35 billion in revenue and the production of more than 1.4 billion beverage cases annually.

The organization oversees a complex, high-volume landscape built on SAP and Salesforce, along with numerous proprietary systems. Snowflake is the central platform for analytics across all bottlers, serving as the foundation for real-time insights across finance, sales, and supply chain functions.

Before modernizing its data stack, CONA relied on a legacy SAP HANA BI solution. However, the system presented growing challenges around performance, cost, and scalability. More critically, data was locked within a single CONA-managed environment, forcing redundant replication across all 11 bottling partners.

For example, Ritesh Sagi, Director of Business Intelligence at CONA, shared that every time his team needed to share data, they had to move it 11 times. This created friction and limited CONA’s partners’ ability to enrich and act on data locally.

CONA needed a new approach — one that could not only scale with growing volumes but also deliver real-time access while maintaining security and governance.

CONA’s unified data ecosystem built on Fivetran + Snowflake

With Snowflake on Microsoft Azure as its destination of choice, CONA could load data once and securely distribute it to individual bottlers, who could then blend data with local sources like utility usage and supply metrics for more contextualized insights. Snowflake’s interoperability across clouds, including Azure, also supported CONA’s federated model by enabling bottlers on different platforms to participate without disruption.

But while Snowflake was a clear part of CONA’s tech stack, SAP integration remained a roadblock. The team needed a solution that could reliably extract and replicate SAP data without overloading critical transactional systems.

After nearly a year of evaluation, CONA chose Fivetran for its ability to perform change data capture (CDC) from SAP. CONA’s SAP Basis team ran months of rigorous testing to ensure the new pipeline wouldn’t compromise SAP performance, even under its unique requirement of 24/7 continuous archiving.

Sagi explained that his team ran baseline performance tests with and without supplemental logging and Fivetran enabled, using simulated transactions to compare metrics like log write time and CPU usage. “That helped our SAP Basis team isolate any performance impact,” Sagi says. “Ultimately, Fivetran’s capabilities to detect changes — without any footprint on the source  — was a game changer for us.”

Accelerating business decisions with timely SAP data insights

The implementation was shaped by a close working partnership between CONA and Fivetran. Together, CONA and Fivetran addressed unique requirements like 24/7 archiving, soft deletes, and segment-level row-level security. Fivetran also helped CONA cleanly migrate from SAP DB2 to S/4HANA, one of the largest such migrations in the industry at the time. While the first few weeks brought some hiccups, Sagi cited Fivetran’s responsiveness and urgency in addressing them as key to the migration’s overall success.

While initial ingestion leveraged micro-batching, CONA quickly moved to full CDC-based replication with Fivetran by mid-2022. Today, SAP data is replicated to a secure staging area, then surfaced through a medallion architecture with bronze, silver, and gold layers — each optimized for visibility, transformation, and reporting.

To ensure governance, CONA applies bottler-specific logic at the staging level so that each partner sees only the data they’re authorized to access. The team also standardized naming conventions (e.g., converting SAP-coded field names to business terms) to drive adoption and ease of use.

“We didn’t just want a data warehouse. We wanted a data integration platform that could evolve with us, and Fivetran gave us that.”
— Ritesh Sagi, Director of Business Intelligence at CONA

Sales teams use up-to-date data to optimize pricing, promotions, and customer engagement. Meanwhile, finance teams leverage instant access to journal entries, invoices, and settlement activities to speed up the month-end close process and reduce uncertainty during reconciliation.

Today, roughly 35,000 users across CONA’s bottler network rely on data products built on Snowflake and powered by Fivetran pipelines. Real-time access to SAP data has transformed both frontline operations and back office workflows.

“We expected our account teams to benefit,” says David McClure, Chief Data Officer at CONA. “What surprised us was how much value our back office found; real-time visibility helped them close books faster and make cleaner decisions throughout the month.”

Harnessing AI and LLMs on a trusted Fivetran + Snowflake foundation

With its SAP data now streaming into Snowflake, CONA is actively exploring new innovations in AI, natural language querying, and business-context-aware analytics.

“Now that we’ve eliminated the SAP data silos, we’re ready to build on this Fivetran and Snowflake foundation with the right AI and ML applications that deliver real ROI.”
— David McClure, Chief Data Officer at CONA

Bottlers are beginning to experiment with semantic layers and large language model (LLM)-driven interfaces, moving beyond static reports and toward dynamic, insight-driven decision making. The team is also closely watching the evolution of SAP Datasphere (BDC) and SAP Rise, though for now, they’re maintaining an Azure-based S/4HANA environment. With one of the largest SAP transaction volumes in the network, the team is prioritizing flexibility and transparency as they evaluate next steps.

For organizations just beginning their SAP modernization journey, Sagi offers this advice: “There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Stress-test everything. Work closely with your SAP Basis team. Ask every question, no matter how minor, and make sure your vendors can meet those needs.”

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