News
Delivering festive cheer to our customers this holiday season
08/12/2022
Christmas and the holiday season is one of the biggest selling moments of the year for CCEP.
To find out how we help spread festive cheer to our customers, we sat down with our Chief Customer Service and Supply Chain Officer, José Antonio Echeverría.
What makes Christmas so special for Coca-Cola?
For many of us, the festive season hasn’t truly begun until we’ve seen Coca-Cola’s iconic Christmas truck advert.
The advert showcases the role Coca-Cola plays in the magic of Christmas and the excitement of gathering together with loved ones to celebrate this special time of year.
It’s also one of the key selling moment for our customers – a time when consumers are buying their favourite products to share with family and friends.
What do we do to get ready for the holiday season each year?
We take our responsibility to make sure consumers can buy the drinks and packs they want at this time of year very seriously, and start planning for Christmas months in advance.
The first step is really to have a clear and evidence-based view of how many products and the type of packs we need to produce to cater for customer and consumer needs. We call this customer demand and supply planning.
To do this we look at historic sales data and then consider a whole raft of other factors that might influence how many products we produce.
Those factors might include the weather, big events that are going on at the same time and what promotions we are running – this includes our limited edition festive packaging.
We then take all this insight and use it to set really clear plans for what products we want to produce, how many of them to produce and when they need to be ready by.
How has this process evolved over time?
We see a big opportunity to use enhanced data and technology to supercharge this planning process and make it work even better for CCEP and our customers.
As an example, we’re exploring how machine learning – or artificial intelligence – can help us create an even more accurate prediction of customer demand. This will help us improve even further service levels for our end customers and inform our manufacturing plans across the year.
How do you make the process work?
As with everything at CCEP, it’s the passion and quality of our people that makes all of this possible. Effective planning is a high level skill and we pride ourselves on having the best people in the industry.
We ensure this in two ways – through recruiting external talent from across the world and by investing in training and development for existing colleagues.
Is this process the same in all the markets you operate in?
As a large, multi-national business, we’ve been able to harness best practice from across our markets to find the most effective way of customer demand and supply chain planning.
All our markets follow this consistent approach, while still having the flexibility to respond to specific local factors.
How do you know it is working?
We track our customer service levels very closely. Our service levels are already very strong – so to make even small improvements takes a lot of work. But our goal in enhancing our customer demand and supply planning process is getting even better.
Ultimately, our aim is to create value for our customers by delivering the products that consumers want. And we’re succeeding in this aim – we’ve created around €600 million in value for customers in Europe so far this year.
Why does it matter for our business?
Beyond creating value for our customers, which is our key focus, successful planning has a number of real benefits for the business.
It ensures we’re running our business efficiently and as sustainably as possible, never producing and storing more product than we need to, and helping to maintain cashflow across the year.
Finally, how will you celebrate Christmas?
I'm excited to travel together with my wife and sons to Valencia in eastern Spain where we will spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with family and friends.