Engineering route-to-market and field-sales automation for Coca-Cola Beverages Africa

Route-to-market in African FMCG is one of the most demanding field operations in business. A bottler at CCBA's scale sells through an enormous, diverse network of outlets — from formal retail to informal traders and the HORECA (hotel, restaurant and café) trade — each with different ordering patterns, and served by field reps who need to plan visits, capture orders and manage relationships on the move, often with intermittent connectivity.

Automating field sales across that network means engineering for scale and for variety at once. The same capability has to work for a rep visiting many outlets a day and for a trade customer placing an order themselves, across markets that differ in infrastructure, product mix and how outlets buy.

Adding a HORECA trade programme and an online ordering app widened the scope from equipping reps to serving customers directly — two different channels that still have to draw on a consistent view of outlets, products and orders.

For a bottler, route-to-market execution is the business. Revenue depends on outlets being visited, stocked and ordered from reliably, so the effectiveness of field sales translates directly into volume. Friction in the rep's day, or in how a trade customer orders, is friction in the top line.

The strategic stake is reach and consistency across a vast, fragmented market. Digital field-sales tools and a direct ordering channel let the bottler serve more outlets more consistently than a manual operation can — and give it a coherent view of a network that would otherwise be impossible to see whole.

The engineering team started from the field operation itself — how reps plan and execute outlet visits, how orders are captured, and how the HORECA trade and direct-ordering channels differ from standard field sales. That discovery set the shared model of outlets, products and orders the different channels would draw on.

Field-sales automation was engineered on Salesforce, giving reps structured visit planning, order capture and customer management, while custom app engineering delivered the online ordering experience where a packaged tool could not fit the market or the channel.

Delivery ran iteratively and channel by channel — sales-force automation, the HORECA trade programme and the online ordering app rollout — with integration and testing across markets treated as core work, so the tools behaved consistently as they were rolled out at scale.

Cloud23 engineered field-sales automation on Salesforce, equipping CCBA's reps with digital visit planning, order capture and customer-management tools built for a high-volume, high-variety outlet network rather than a single sales motion.

A HORECA trade programme extended the capability to the hotel, restaurant and café channel, engineering for how that trade buys and is served alongside standard field sales.

An online ordering app, delivered through custom app engineering, gave trade customers a direct digital ordering channel — drawing on the same view of outlets, products and orders as the rep-facing tools so the two channels stay coherent.

The programme delivered digital route-to-market and field-sales capability, giving reps structured tools for planning visits and capturing orders across a large and diverse outlet network where the operation was previously more manual.

The HORECA trade programme gives the bottler a channel-specific capability for the hotel, restaurant and café trade, and the online ordering app gives trade customers a direct digital route to order — extending reach beyond what a rep-only model can cover.

Because the channels draw on a consistent view of outlets, products and orders, the platform gives the business a more coherent picture of its route-to-market operation across the markets it serves.