Coca Cola HBC uses TeamViewer Frontline to streamline picking operations and reduce error rates on-site

Background

Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (HBC) is one of the largest bottlers for The Coca-Cola Company in terms of volume, with sales of more than two billion units every year. The warehouse procedures mainly consist of mixed pallet picking, so crates, shrink-wrapped bottle packs, and cans that are being packed onto pallets for the delivery trucks. In their daily work, the operators in Coca-Cola HBC’s warehouses used paper lists or tablets mounted on pallet jacks and radio frequency (RF) scanners.

Set out to find new, more efficient warehousing solutions Coca-Cola started investigating industrial augmented reality (AR) technology starting with a pilot at a Coca-Cola HBC distribution centre in Thessaloniki, Greece. There, a team of 16 pickers that collects multi-product orders was equipped with smart glasses and TeamViewer Frontline’s vision picking solution xPick.

This starting point was deemed a success with convincing results that led to an immediate ramp up of Coca-Cola HBC’s AR journey. A large-scale implementation in another six warehouses took place in 2019, the same year the first pilot started, to a total of 29 warehouses in 2022 with at least another 5 planned go-lives in 2023, making vision picking Coca-Cola HBC’s new standard warehousing technology.

Challenge

To stay ahead of the curve and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, Coca-Cola HBC is constantly exploring new technologies that help optimize their processes. One of the key factors that the bottler is pursuing is delivery of the highest quality. For their warehouse operations this means a focus on the accuracy of customer orders being delivered.

The inconsistent, outdated methodologies, pick by paper or handheld RF guns combined with tablets mounted onto pallet jacks, initially built to support the pickers were identified as inefficient and as one possible error source. Wrong deliveries are not just a critical element when it comes to customer satisfaction, but also represent a major cost factor. Rejected orders have to be brought back to the warehouse and a new order has to be shipped, resulting in a spike in logistics handling costs, all due to wrong picking.

To reach highest accuracy, Coca-Cola HBC identified the opportunity to switch to smart glasses, improving the accuracy of mixed pallet picking in their warehouses. On top of increasing the output quality of warehouse operations, Coca-Cola HBC aimed at higher productivity as labor shortage leads to an increased demand.

Solution

To optimize and standardize their processes, Coca-Cola HBC chose to implement the industry-proven TeamViewer Frontline solution xPick running on robust RealWear smart glasses. The pickers are shown the picking items, picking locations, and quantities right in their field of view. To confirm they picked from the right location, they scan a QR code above the pallet with the smart glasses’ camera. The picked amount is confirmed via voice command. This leaves the picker’s hands free for the actual task: putting the drinks onto the pallets. The orders are displayed in a step-by-step manner, while the order information is pulled directly from Coca-Cola’s SAP warehouse management system.

The backend integration enables automatic status updates of all individual orders. Full integration into the backend system was achieved through a close collaboration between TeamViewer and Coca-Cola HBC’s system integrator.

Throughout the initial implementation phase, an active participation of the people who actually do the job was seen as crucial to the project’s success. Overall, an agile approach was chosen to improve the solution on the go — constantly accompanied by TeamViewer’s solution delivery and customer success teams for after-go-live support. This led to an easyto-scale solution template that facilitated the following mass rollouts, empowering more than 1,000 pickers in multiple shifts across 17 countries already today.

Outcome

After only two months of implementing the vision picking solution, Coca-Cola HBC’s picking accuracy had already reached 99.99%, achieving the set goal of reducing errors, and at the same time improving customer satisfaction rates and reducing cost of returns. While picking accuracy was one of the main KPI Coca-Cola HBC was aiming to improve, achieving a productivity increase of 10% at the same time was crucial, especially regarding the continuing labor shortages within the European markets.

Compared to the previous solutions (RF guns and handheld terminals), the implementation of vision picking also resulted in lower hardware costs, improving their CAPEX, and did not require oftentimes costly changes to the warehouse infrastructure.

The best part? Their pickers are satisfied with the new solution. Before the deployment, they tested a pick-by-voice solution and other technologies and clearly voted for a vision picking solution. The highly intuitive character of Frontline’s xPick solution, combining visual cues, voice interaction, and easy scanning, as well as the instant increase in productivity has led to high employee engagement and adoption rates. This did not only accelerate the switch to the new method for the existing workforce, but also speeds up the onboarding of new staff, enabling Coca-Cola HBC to react more flexibly to seasonal demand fluctuation.