HONOLULU (Cisco Partner Summit 2008) April 10, 2008 - Cisco announced that it has shipped its 4 millionth Integrated Services Router (ISR), an achievement that was celebrated when Chairman and CEO John Chambers presented Coca-Cola Enterprises Chief Information Officer Esat Sezer with an award for deploying this milestone ISR at a press conference today. Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), the world's largest marketer, producer and distributor of Coca-Cola products, deployed Cisco® ISRs as part of an ongoing global executive communications process that is allowing the company to enhance its communication and collaboration routines to more than 30,000 employees in more than 440 facilities across most of North America and Western Europe.
CCE's transformational journey began in February 2007, when the company's Global Leadership Agenda, strategic business priorities, vision and values were communicated in a visual, collaborative and consistent manner to employees around the world using live broadcast video technology and unified communications. The results were overwhelmingly positive, and CCE soon noted that its workforce was more aligned, collaborative and efficient than before.
"To become the best beverage sales and customer service company, we are examining new ways to drive innovation, collaboration, efficiency and effectiveness throughout our organization," said Sezer. "Cisco is helping us share strategic business objectives with employees in real time, integrating our communications and data applications into a framework that supports our business and IT innovations."
To better serve a consumer base that has more specific needs than ever, CCE is managing an increasingly diverse portfolio of products, making real-time logistics and accuracy paramount. To further improve operations, CCE continued to evolve its business processes by deploying Voice Pick, a voice-enabled application that increases order accuracy.
Using Cisco's solution as an integrated, intelligent foundation, CCE deployed Cisco ISRs with Voice eXtensible Markup Language (Voice XML) and mobile telephony to integrate its Cisco Unified Communications solutions with its supply-chain management (SCM) systems. The result was Voice Pick, a real-time voice-enabled order fulfillment application that allows order builders to communicate directly with various warehouse management systems using wireless phones and headsets. Once again, CCE's vision yielded significant operational improvements, with order accuracy consistently at 99.8 percent and training time to educate new employees reduced from two weeks to two days.
A network of Cisco partners, including AT&T, BT, Datria, and World Wide Technology helped CCE acquire and roll out its integrated communications systems globally. For example, after CCE integrated the Datria application into its SCM system, Datria integrated the Cisco Customer Voice Portal application with the Cisco ISR to help create the highly scalable Voice Pick solution.
In addition to operational business savings, CCE is able to realize improvements in its corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts. By processing orders more efficiently, the company can dispatch forklifts on fewer trips, resulting in reduced fuel and by-product emissions, so warehouses are greener. At each facility, Cisco ISRs reduce power and emissions by combining the functionality of up to seven overlay devices into a single integrated platform.
As CCE's focus on innovation continues to generate growth throughout the business, the company is exploring a more advanced use of video in the form of Digital Media Systems, digital signage, and the incorporation of 3G video on mobile handsets.
Services Integration Drives Router Popularity
First introduced in 2004, the Cisco ISR represents a major technology inflection point for Cisco with its integration of multiple voice, video, data, mobility and application optimization services on a single routing platform. Cisco is continuing to deliver new capabilities and announced today it is opening the Cisco ISR to third-party application development, introducing the potential of many more integrated services available on the Cisco ISR, one of the company's most highly adopted network platforms. See the press release titled "Cisco 'Empowered Branch' Delivers More Applications and New Business Models; Opens Routers to Customers and Third-Party Applications" for more information (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_041008.html).
"At Cisco, we constantly focus on developing superior products that help companies such as Coca-Cola Enterprises build a network platform with the capabilities to enhance collaboration and business productivity," said Ian Pennell, senior vice president of Cisco's Access Routing Technology Group. "Beyond the 4 million milestone, by opening the Cisco ISR to third parties Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers meet their business needs in more innovative and efficient ways than ever before. It also opens new business opportunities and routes to market for our partners."
Cisco ISRs are at the center of the Empowered Branch, a solution that helps customers institute new business models by providing real-time and consistent collaboration experiences anywhere and everywhere across the entire enterprise. For more information please visit www.cisco.com/go/isr.
