Case Study: Coca-Cola Bottling Company United cuts operational costs with SAP and IBM Coca-Cola Bottling Company has chosen Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino to manage the data generated in their bottling plants. By placing it all on one IBM server, the necessary data on inventory and production costs are entered one time into the program by a production employee and it can then be accessed by other departments as necessary. The use of Lotus Notes has helped improve scheduling for production and keeping their inventory levels under tight control. With Lotus software, the company is able to input information from their manufacturing operation and use that data to create reports. The Lotus software is also capable of creating the reports the company requires. Without this software, inventory control would have to be accomplished in part through a manual process and then input into other software and finally extracted and analyzed using additional software and key strokes. The company is saving money through the ability to forecast and consequently keep inventory levels to a minimum. In Coca-Cola’s case, the production numbers being input into Lotus Notes is information. When this information is translated into numbers that can be used for reporting, scheduling and inventory control purposes it then becomes data. Data resulting from information can be manipulated, examined and graphed. Retrieved from the IBM Software website: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/STRD-77PLSL?OpenDocument&Site=lotus&cty=en_us