Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- When Sara Park took over integrated planning for Coca-Cola North America in 2019, she inherited a vast supply chain spanning everything from Powerade to Fairlife Dairy, managed largely through a web of Excel spreadsheets.
- The COVID-19 pandemic was a stress test that forced her team to build the plane while flying it. It highlighted the urgent need to move to a demand-driven, proactive model where supply and demand stay in constant conversation.
- To solve the challenge of coordinating 65 independent bottling partners with uneven planning capabilities, Sara needed a platform sophisticated enough for North America's requirements and intuitive enough that a small bottler could us it without training.
- During a software bake-off, Pigment won because the team listened to what planners needed rather than offering a rigid, predetermined solution. Sara’s planners are now asking when the POC will go to production.
- Sara views AI and decision intelligence as a way to give planners “superpowers.” By automating complex trade-off analysis, AI allows her team to focus on strategy and reclaim their time outside of work.
- Despite the technical transformation, Sara's north star remains people-first. She believes a leader's job is to enable employees to be the best version of themselves, using technology to remove the manual tasks that otherwise grind them down.
There’s a famous promise at the heart of Coca-Cola: to keep a cold drink "within an arm's reach of desire."
For Sara Park, the Vice President of Integrated Planning for North America, that promise is a massive logistical puzzle. Her team isn't just planning for the iconic glass bottle; they’re managing the demand signals and inventory targets for everything from SmartWater and Powerade to the high-growth Fairlife Dairy line.
When Sara stepped into the role in 2019, the "engine" behind this massive portfolio was running on a legacy of manual habit. Data lived in local Excel files, updates were shared via Outlook, and "real-time" was a concept rather than a reality.
She had six months before that reality was tested by the COVID-19 pandemic.
130 flavors vs. one pandemic
The global supply chain rarely gets its "five minutes in the spotlight" until something goes wrong. During the COVID-19 pandemic, aluminum cans became a constraint almost immediately, prioritized for beer over soda. As a result, Coca-Cola North America cut their portfolio of over 130 SKUs down to five: Coke Classic, Diet Coke, Coke Zero Sugar, Sprite, and Orange Fanta. For Sara, it was a painful lesson in the limits of manual planning.
The experience taught Sara how demand and supply need to relate to each other. The traditional sequence, where demand creates and supply delivers, breaks under pressure. Both sides need to stay in constant conversation.
Modernizing a system that involves 65 independent bottling partners, all with different levels of planning maturity, requires a platform people actually want to use – and one they can walk into on day one without hand-holding.
Coca-Cola's sparkling beverages are produced and delivered by those 65 partners, who purchase concentrate and handle manufacturing and distribution themselves. Every new flavor and limited-run innovation (of which Coca-Cola launches several hundred every year) requires coordinating production and distribution plans across the entire network. Some partners generate SKU-level weekly forecasts by location. Others have no formal planning infrastructure at all.
Before Pigment, that coordination happened over email. A retailer changing their mind about regional versus national distribution meant another round of updated spreadsheets sent to dozens of partners, with no reliable way to know who was working from which version.
What Sara needed was a platform that could hold all of that in one place, with an ease of use that reached the smallest bottler in the network. Ideally, someone could log on and find whatever they needed without being trained on the platform.
The vendor bake-off
Sara organized a “bake-off” between three software vendors. The focus of the bake-off was what she calls decision intelligence: giving planners the information to navigate difficult trade-offs when supply and demand fall out of balance.
The scenario she provided was one every planner on her team knows well. An order comes in, but the inventory is in the wrong location. To solve this, the team must decide whether to:
- Pull inventory from a distant location
- Break the production schedule
- Fulfill from a different warehouse
Each option (or combination of options) has a different cost and impact on revenue. Planners weighed those variables manually, relying on experience and whatever data they could pull together in the moment.
Sara says that Pigment won the evaluation because their team listened. When planners said remaining shelf life was critical because inventory past a certain threshold is no longer viable to ship, Pigment incorporated it. And, they kept incorporating feedback every week as the planners asked for adjustments to the decision tree, the variables being weighted, and the interface.
Over time, Pigment’s machine learning recognises which option a planner keeps choosing across different variable combinations. And as it learns, it begins surfacing the top choices proactively for the planner to decide. The planner is still in control, but they spend less time getting to the decision.
The planning team is the beneficiary Sara has at heart
Sara's desire to optimize the planning function is driven, above all else, by her care for her team. She wants to know that her planners are engaged, and that they're spending their weekends away from their laptops. The goal of decision intelligence is to put decision-making in the hands of the people who are closest to the problem, empowering them with the information they need to act on their own judgment.
Sara believes that her team’s readiness depends on her own. It’s why she reads a hundred books a year – if she stops paying attention to what's coming, then it falls on her team. For Sara, the proof that decision intelligence is worth it is what her planners get back, starting with their Sunday nights.
Sara has been through over a dozen restructures in her 14 years at Coca-Cola. She has built planning infrastructure under quarantine, watched co-manufacturing partners go bankrupt, and even rebuilt her team's entire collaboration model from scratch.
Through it all, she has applied the same test to every initiative: does this make my planners' lives genuinely better? When the answer is yes, adoption follows.
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