Optimise Processes – Coca-Cola Hellenic

Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCHBC) are a consumer packaged goods business and strategic bottling partner of the Coca-Cola company.

CCHBC are a FTSE 100 company operating in 29 countries across Europe and Africa with revenues over €7bn per annum.

Having failed in numerous recent bids, a CCHBC (Ireland) Director got in touch with Bespoke Bids to find out how they could learn from their failures to achieve success. The idea was to improve their bid processes, use the Ireland business as a pilot for these improved processes and then roll the processes out to all global teams.

Following an initial discovery call with Bespoke Bids’ Solution Director, Dave Jones it was agreed that we would conduct a detailed analysis of some recent bid responses, a full review of the CCHBC bid processes and then a bespoke bid workshop with CCHBC leaders focusing on agreed improvement areas.

Past Bids

The past bids we analysed were poorly structured (not addressing fully all components of the question posed and evaluation criteria. They relied far too heavily on implied CCHBC expertise as market leaders – rather than factual evidence-based examples. There were also not enough about tangible benefits put forward they could deliver to the buyer (e.g. innovations were expressed as feautures, not how they would provide tangible/measurable benefits to the buyer and end users).

Workshop

Based on the bid response reviews and several online discussions to learn about CCHBC organisation, products and services, bid pipeline and future business profile, we developed objectives and a bespoke agenda for a face-to-face workshop.

We organised the workshop to take place at the CCHBC offices in Belfast, which was attended in person and online by 20 business development leads from across Europe.

The aim of the workshop was to combine agreeing revised tailored bid processes (what would work within CCHBC) as well as training and upskilling the CCHBC team (including developing a win strategy for each tender, organising and managing the bid response and writing to maximise scoring).

The workshop also covered how imminent business and market changes (vending industry moving to contactless, demand based fulfillment and creating social hubs) and the impact that would have on the tender process and bid responses.

Dave walked through the current CCHBC bid processes with the team, comparing them to best practice and how we could introduce positive changes for future CCHBC bids. We also discussed how it all tied together with the challenges of the business and market changes.

The workshop was delivered successfully with the main output of the session being an action plan to improve the bid process applied across the business. The main improvements identified were focused on the bid responses, structuring each question out into its constituent parts and including much more supporting evidence than they had in the past.

Following the workshop, we discussed how best to implement the improvements initially in Ireland and then to other regional business units.

The next major bid submitted (vending services for the whole of Northern Ireland Rail) was succsessful with high quality scores. CCHBC credited the win to learning and process improvements made through the workshop delivered by Bespoke Bids.