About

Covering Turkey and the Caucasus and Central Asia regions (TCCA), the regional legal team at global beverage producer Coca-Cola has remained a strategic business partner that provides high quality, timely legal service as well as creating comprehensive governance practices. Following a recent internal restructure, the team of five is led by Zeynep Derman Kucukonder legal director of Coca-Cola Turkey, Caucasus and Central Asia business unit. A key feature of the team’s work within the last year has been designing different business models to overcome currency devaluations in the TCCA countries they operate in and closing the deals to create strategic partnerships in Turkey. The team’s goal is to focus on ways of simplification and efficiency while providing legal services to the business. Fulfilling this, Coca-Cola’s TCCA legal team reviews processes periodically to assess risks and revises them to be more agile without compromising compliance. The team has also designed and implemented an online review and approval process for contracts, which has increased efficiency and reduced risk throughout the company. Another way in which the team has embraced technology to stimulate change, is through the creation of a “Government Dealings Approval Tool”, which helps the team and the wider company to ensure the reporting is on time, accurate and compliant with local laws and internal policies. As the company has a strong focus on marketing, the team is heavily involved with promotions, which are jointly arranged with its bottlers. Describing their approach to managing the workload, and their creation of a “Promotions Process Flow”, Kucukonder notes: ‘There are a lot of details attached to the promotions as well as many stakeholders involved in the overall process. We also work in two or three languages, which adds more complexity. To manage the process more effectively, we have created a process flow chart which is quite adoptable for each and every promotion. Therefore, from intern to most senior team member, everyone easily understands what to do, when to do it and how to do it. It brings a lot of practicality and things become more systematic even for the most complex promotions’.