Headline Partner

Laia Collazos, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners

Describe your career to date

Digital and data have been a constant during my career. I began as a technology consultant in different European countries for government, retail and media organisations, it was great to experience first-hand new disciplines that we take for granted today, such as agile programming, user experience and analytics, to name a few. Businesses were engaging for the first time with customers digitally.

I then worked at GroupM, the WPP media investment company. This was the digital advertising era, where data was queen. Based in New York, I led global teams to build data driven solutions for trading teams.

In 2017, I moved back to London to join Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) – the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler by revenue – as CIO for Great Britain. Visiting customers with sales teams and working in factories one realises what it really takes to make a bottle of Coca-Cola and our other great products – and the data and technology that makes it possible.

It is an honour to now be the chief data and analytics officer, a new role for CCEP created in 2021. I am responsible for ensuring CCEP is driving value from data wherever possible – first prioritising customer and sustainability. Crucially at CCEP, our use of data all comes with a single goal in mind – to make us a better partner for our customers and better workplace for our people.

What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?
CCEP has been using advanced analytics for some time in areas such as salesforce execution, promo optimisation, procurement or demand planning. CCEP’s commercial teams partner with customers to provide data-led insights, and are recognised for their category vision. We are building on years of progress to become more data driven.

Our efforts in setting foundations – technology, data and mindset – are contributing towards advancement in CCEP’s data maturity at scale. CCEP has award-winning data solutions that underpin field sales decisions or energy usage. Our sales teams have been recognised for their use of data by customers. This gives us confidence that we have data leading practices, and can extend as we progress on this multi-year journey.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for
CCEP follows a hub and spoke model – with scale and expert skill at the centre, empowering countries and functions though spokes. The hub includes data platform, governance and product delivery. Data scientists team up with business for exploratory analytics, or work as part of product teams when these models scale. Business partners connect the hub with the spokes, and data analysts become experts in a given data domain. Data and analytics is a distributed team based across CCEP’s territories: from Madrid to Sydney.

The business spokes (commercial, supply chain etc.) have product and data owners as well as insights teams. As an example, data and analytics collaborates with the demand planning spoke to build inventory optimisation models; or with commercial insights teams to scale data-powered tools.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organisation and on the industry as a whole?

Staying focused on the outcome is key. The industry buzz can be a distraction of words about new approaches and technologies that are seen as revolutionary. Ultimately, value is what matters, and persistence with the data is fundamental. It’s easy to be lured into the latest trend, and forget that a data-driven transformation requires people who are ready for change and data that is good.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organisation or just the data function?

CCEP’s data strategy outlines the vision and how we get there. Our vision is one where analytics are infused in our most important decisions at CCEP, and drive value creation for our customers, our suppliers, our partners and our business.

There are four ingredients that are of equal importance: to measure the metrics that matter; to manage data as an asset; to drive a data mindset; and maximise the value through data-driven products.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organisation, particularly with regard to data quality?

If you know anyone who has a resounding yes to this question please let me know. Here again, we focus on the value – the task at hand is daunting when one looks at all the data. Plus CCEP is a global company with recent mergers and acquisitions. We use the momentum of business programmes to mobilise data governance practices. The data governance office has established data owners and is formalising data steward roles and quality analysts – they also have tools such as catalogue and quality platform. The aim is to have data that is defined, owned, quality assured, secured and accessible.

Laia Collazos
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