Coca-Cola HBC Picks Cloud Supply Chain Planning Solution

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumption patterns as bars and restaurants were closed and more people re-created their consumption routines at home. This means that beverage producers need the ability to better predict demand to ensure they match planned production to consumer needs. To improve visibility and seamlessly orchestrate its supply chain, Coca-Cola HBC has chosen Blue Yonder’s SaaS-based Luminate Planning solutions to power its end-to-end supply chain.

“Our business needs to adapt quickly to changing consumer behavior, disruptions, and evolving business scenarios by leveraging operational agility and delivering strong execution and value for our stakeholders,” said Gerhard Seidl, group planning director, Coca-Cola HBC. “Blue Yonder, as our new cloud-based demand and supply chain planning solution, is a huge step for our digital end-to-end planning strategy, which is a company priority. The system will touch many people across all functions and will be our backbone to run the business, facilitating advanced cross-functional digital collaboration and decision making.”

Coca-Cola HBC is a strategic bottling partner of The Coca-Cola Company in 28 countries, offering brands in the sparkling, juice, water, sport, energy, plant-based, ready-to-drink tea, coffee, adult sparkling, and premium spirits categories. The company was looking for a digital, end-to-end planning solution to support a 24/7 supply chain and its broad product portfolio of more than 100 brands and 4,000 SKUs.

With the new solution Coca-Cola HBC expected to:

• Support company growth and performance through an efficient supply chain.
• Improve sustainability efforts through better forecasting and planning to right-size production, resources, and raw materials.
• Digitally transform its supply chain by leveraging flexible processes to support fast decision-making and adapt quickly to changing business environments and consumer demand.
• Remove silos allowing for the ability to seamlessly integrate and leverage data across departments and from multiple sources.
• Protect previous IT investments through seamless integration with other strategic systems/processes.

Blue Yonder’s Luminate Planning, a SaaS-based solutions portfolio built on Microsoft Azure is expected to provide Coca-Cola HBC with better visibility and seamless orchestration through the entire supply chain to sense demand, minimize costs, better leverage resources and materials, gain operational agility, and achieve effective execution. Through artificial intelligence and machine learning, the company can support both its growth and commitment to minimize its environmental impact thorough better forecasting and more efficiently planned production and distribution processes.