Coca-Cola Hellenic’s Autonomous Supply Chain Transformation

Supply chains grow ever more complex, particularly for organizations burdened by legacy systems that require entirely new configurations. However, with the right partners and tools, organizations can overcome the challenges they face when implementing supply chain transformations. During this webinar, Shalendra Kumar, head of digital enterprise platform for the Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company, shared his success story, touching on the growing importance of autonomous processes supported by technologies like digital twins and simulations, control towers, and industrial IoT as the keys to moving toward an Industry 5.0 roadmap.This is the full transcript from the June 11 “How Coca-Cola Hellenic Transformed Their Supply Chain With Autonomous Tech” webinar. Liz Dominquez: Hello everyone, and welcome to How Coca-Cola Hellenic Transformed Their Supply Chain With Autonomous Tech. My name is Liz Dominguez and I'm the managing editor of CGT. I'm very excited to welcome you here today. I'm going to turn it over to Samad from the Infosys Knowledge Institute, who's going to be moderating today's session featuring Shalendra Kumar from Coca-Cola Hellenic on the topic of supply chain transformations.Samad Masood: Thanks, Liz. Once again, I'm Samad Masood from the Infosys Knowledge Institute and thanks all of you for joining this webinar. It's critical for CPG companies to get their supply chain systems right, but it can be a huge challenge to implement an entirely new system. So, we're going to look today at Coca-Cola Hellenic's demand and supply planning transformation story and what made it a success, and also how other organizations can overcome the challenges they face when implementing supply chain transformations and changing really the way they work.Joining me for this conversation are Shalendra Kumar, head of digital enterprise platform at Coca-Cola Hellenic, Rahul Ubgade, vice president group manager of client services for consumer products, retail and logistics at Infosys, and Bhavna Sharma, principal consultant and program director for supply chain at Infosys. Thank you, everyone. Shalendra, let's start with you. Why don't you give us a bit of a background on your career and what brought you to this point? Tell us a bit about what you've been doing?Shalendra Kumar: Thank you, Samad. I'm about 17 and a half years with Coca-Cola Hellenic. Different roles in supply chain, business strategy, and last five years in digital transformation. I started as supply chain director for our Nigeria business, big business, 13 plants, more than 50 sales depots. After that I led Nigeria business transformation implementing SAP, ERP, ECC in Nigeria around 2012, '13, one of the biggest end-to-end ERP, ECC implementation in Nigeria at that time.After Nigeria assignment, I was working with our group CEO based out of Switzerland for three years as director of strategy, contributing to strategy for 28 countries in our Hellenic group. Then I was heading planning for the group, all 28 countries based out of Greece, managing a team of about 500 people and planning, supply chain planning all across the countries. Last five years I moved from business function to digital transformation in our IT function, which is called digital and technology, leveraging my business and system knowledge. I'm based out of Bulgaria and I'm responsible for IT solutions in supply chain, finance, sustainability, and IT for all the 29 countries. And in this period I had opportunity to work on many digital transformation initiatives.Samad Masood: That's great, Shalendra, what a great and varied career. I think, tell us a bit about the digital transformation projects more specifically. And also, we're talking today about a particular transformation, which was with Blue Yonder. Can you tell us a bit about what you were trying to solve with them and give the audience a feeling for why you chose them, what you were going to do?Shalendra Kumar: Okay, so let me just first start a bit with the other digital transformation projects. So, 2018 I joined and we were doing augmented reality in manufacturing, remote support, et cetera, and then COVID came and that time we actually accelerated the whole augmented reality and remote support and went to more than 55 plants in a period of three months. We are one of the very high successful users for this, for maintenance and picking, et cetera. And then logistic transformation, things like automated yard management, warehouse systems, driverless forklifts, real-time transportation tracking and others. Now, in terms of Blue Yonder, we were interested in this system of differentiation to bring intelligence into our decision making and planning process for demand and supply planning to improve customer service, optimize our cost, and improve productivity. That was the reason for looking for Blue Yonder.Samad Masood: Rahul, I'd like to bring you in here. Can you give us some more of the context you've seen worked with many other companies like Coca-Cola Hellenic? What is driving the interest in demand and supply planning platforms like Blue Yonder? What are these platforms bringing?Rahul Ubgade: Yeah, so I think it's very nicely context said by Shalendra here. Coca-Cola Hellenic themselves went through the whole ERP journey, which is putting your system of records in place, ensuring standardization of processes. But I think when it comes to supply chain, every company has so unique in their supply chain, right? Their plants have a certain age, they have certain capability, their transport lanes are specific, their logistics providers and the way they are organizing their warehouses could be quite different, and because of multiple legacy reasons. So, your ability to take that business context and reflect that into automated decision-making platform requires you to have a system which are differentiating you for your specific context.And that's exactly the reason, which as Shalendra explained that they were looking to solve that problem. How do you get your end-to-end supply chain from your demand planning, supply planning, material planning integrated together in the specific context of CCS? Now, this is something which Blue Yonder is leading the pack here, but there are multiple platforms like this. You've got o9 making strides here, you've got Kenexus, SAP is reinventing themselves with IBP. These are the systems of differentiation which are gaining traction and importance and which we think it will really bring that value add in terms of getting better business outcome. Bhavna, do you want to add something on this in your context the way you have been helping our clients to develop this further?Bhavna Sharma: Certainly, Rahul. As you clearly mentioned there, I would like to add on. We see the organizations are moving towards this end-to-end integrated planning approach, which helps them definitely to standardize their operation processes like SNOP being customer-focused and also helps them to reach a decision which is data-driven, and all this with minimum direct human oversight. Solutions like Blue Yonder definitely help these organizations for their responsiveness and better outcomes of their KPIs. These solutions, they give a visibility to these talk levels for an example, when orders needs to be triggered, where to be delivered, even predict all this with a far better precision. These insights and real-time data helps the organizations to be more informed and equipped to handle any disruptions that may happen at any time. Thank you.Samad Masood: I can see it really modernizing, making things a bit more faster paced, agile, responsive, but my understanding was that in this particular example, Shalendra, it wasn't all plain sailing. And as many large transformations are, there are challenges, there are things that need to be overcome. Can you tell us a bit about what were those obstacles or difficulties that you faced in this project?Shalendra Kumar: Yeah, so let's say I talked about why we selected Blue Yonder, and Rahul also mentioned about Blue Yonder being one of the leading ones in terms of ability to handle very complex businesses and supply chain and beverage. Supply chain is a complex business with low inventories and distributed manufacturing. Once we selected Blue Yonder, we went about the normal design and configuration session, design workshop, fit gap and configuration in order to fit it into our business. And we did very thorough testing after the configuration. And what we were seeing was that things were working technically okay, what we wanted the system to do, the system was doing that.And however, when our first business go live, business in a business unit, in a large business unit, in a large country, we face significant challenges for the business accepting recommendation coming from Blue Yonder solution. Because technically they were right, but they were not making business sense, they were not optimizing the way, as Rahul said, a system of differentiation is supposed to optimize. And we were taken aback and we withdrew the go live and we went into retrospective to see what has gone wrong.At that time we were actually feeling that maybe we have made some coding errors, which we are not capturing. In this whole deep dive retrospective, it was then that we came up with this eureka moment. We realized Blue Yonder is a very powerful tool. It is great at configuring the thinking which is in the mind of the supply planner into algorithm. Now, as Rahul mentioned, every company, every industry operates their supply chain into specific nuances. Now, if we explain the thinking of planner in a very generalistic manner, generalizing everything rather than thinking of different nuances, that is what is configured into the algorithm and that's why the result though technically right are not making business sense.Now, in Blue Yonder there is something called user-defined parameter. They use the term UDP, user-defined parameter. That's not defined by the software programmer, that is defined by the user, and that's what I'm saying, the planner mind. Now, then we felt, then we actually tested some cases and we saw that if we defined all the nuances in the planner's mind into the algorithm, then it was great and is much better, because it does not take that much time and it is not individualistic thinking different from one planner to another.I'll give you one example of this nuances or this differentiation of capturing every type of scenario of planning. Let's say we have some robotic line where there are changeovers from 0.5 liter to one liter to 1.5 liter is done by a robot. These are modern lines acquired in the last three, four, five years. Or we have traditional lines where this changeover from 0.5 to one liter or 1.5 liter is done by the operators. Now, in the traditional line, this pack change, we call it pack change, so changing the package size, takes about two hours. In a robotic line this pack change takes 15 minute or less. Now, hence in a robotic line you are much better running Coke for few days together and keeping on changing pack. Whereas in a traditional line you will run all 0.5 liter Coke, Fanta, Sprite, then go to one liter Coke, Fanta, Sprite.Now, if you have not given to the software programmer in the configuration of Blue Yonder, these nuances and you have given them only the way traditional line is supposed to be planned, the Blue Yonder algorithm will plan even the robotic line with that same logic. Because that's the logic you have told to the algorithm and that is what has been configured. And Blue Yonder has tremendous capability to look at these two types of logics of planning and build it into algorithm. These came through UDPs and we realized that we have to work on UDPs.Now, the next thing came, we said let's look for some partner who has done this kind of thing. Okay, we realize this, but there are more nuances on this. And then we have been working with Infosys on other things. Then I had occasion to meet Bhavna, myself and my team and Vijay and other people, Amit and other people in Infosys, and we realized that they have done similar project for other CPG companies and even other beverage companies, so they are accustomed to robotic line, non-robotic line, or low inventory considerations, all of these. We selected Infosys to join as an implementation partner, and we also took a training organization to help on training material development in organizations in South Africa.We developed a, we call it a USA method, where U is, I said UDPS is simulation and A is acceptance criteria. And what was acceptance criteria? We developed based on our past performance with the planning schedule, what do we expect on customer service level? What do we expect on inventory level? What do we expect on production smoothening? You should not have one week you are producing at 80% of capacity, next week you're producing at 20% of capacity. So, this production smoothening. And we then tested all the simulation outputs in these acceptance criteria for next 52 weeks in two buckets first four weeks, and then week five to 52.Now, suddenly with the help of Infosys and partners and our team, business team and IT team, the black box becomes logical. What people were saying, black box, I don't know, what are the errors? There are coding errors, what's happening? Why is it not giving logical this thing? It suddenly became very logical and planners were able to appreciate the impact which UDP will have on plan solution output, and we were able to come up with improved UDPs and improved plan coding. By now we have, as I said, we have about 500 people in planning organizations in 29 countries. We have rolled out to more than 50% of business units. And now the implementation acceptance, value delivery has been smooth. Thank you.Samad Masood: That's great to hear. That's great to hear. Bhavna, you were working hands-on in this situation that Shalendra has just explained in so much detail. Tell us, what are the sort of skills and knowledge that you're able to bring to this? And why does this sort of partnership approach, why does a company Coca-Cola Hellenic need that additional support? As Shalendra mentioned, you're looking for a partner that had some experience in very similar companies. What are the things that you're able to bring in that project?Bhavna Sharma: Thank you for the question, Samad. Customers start this transformational journey and it is based on their program vision, an improvement, idea of improvement of their business KPI. While they understand the business objective to start this journey, to take upon this journey, but they are looking for a partner with whom they can collaborate. The partner who can bring in the best practices industry experience past similar experience, and also highlight any potential pitfalls that can be avoided.Infosys, we have established a product-centric center of excellence with all the capabilities, including industry experts, domain experts, architects, data managers, program managers, change managers, and so on. This COE, this integrates the client's business requirement with the core product capabilities. This brings the smooth rollouts and it also helps in the value realization. This is the place where tech company like ours, they come in and we play a very vital role in this transformational journey.I will move to your second question, the second part. I will summarize our Infosys and CCH journey based on three pillars. As Shalendra has mentioned about the USA method, so this process, this was jointly evolved with Infosys and CCH working hand in hand, right? This user-defined parameters, Infosys was working very closely with business, CCH business team. Every weekday we were helping them tweaking this values of UDP, keeping in the mind that these will impact the BY plan quality. Each night the simulations runs were conducted and they will consume the change UDP of the day. Those values were consumed and the run was happening in the night. And next day morning, so Infosys and CCH will check again on these simulation outputs how's the plan quality doing and identify where these UDPs still needs to be tweaked. And this process, it continued week after week. We did this around week or two, this entire iterative process until the BY plan quality was within the acceptance criteria.I moved to the pillar two, which is the user data maintenance. We clubbed the parameters, there were so many parameters, so we clubbed these parameters under the business role, user roles, like production planner, college planner, raw material planner. It just made it very easy for them and it was also effective to maintain these manual data maintenance, right? And the third pillar is the part where we are bringing the testing, training and USA all integrated together. We tested day in life of a planner dialogue. To test this, we started with the trainings, and in the trainings we shared the PPT presentations, workbooks, articles, and also the videos with a caption at the bottom at the initial training phase for the users.But then when we are doing this daily testing and we are still enhancing these documents, so every step of USA method is also helping us to improve the documentation. And this dialogue, these were the reference guides of our planner. Even if they face any UAT issues, they will not come to the input as a first point, they will refer to this document first. You see the adoption of this solution is there. So, the approach of these three together, we had the accelerated training, we had these early adopters and these became our change champions. They positively influenced the change acceptance for the further countries that were coming up. So, they were happily influencing them to be able to adopt this solution and be open for this change. This has been a collaborative, successful efforts.Samad Masood: No thanks, Bhavna. And Rahul, I mean, is this typical of the sort of thing you see in the market, the type of partnerships that happen? Because you have clearly CCH and Shalendra, they know what they want, they know what they're trying to achieve, but it does really take that kind of seems a combination of what you're describing, Bhavna, bringing some external expertise, but also bringing the process and the rigor for change to make it really come home. Is this typical of what you're seeing, Rahul in other partnerships?Rahul Ubgade: Yes, for sure. I mean, this model of implementation is a repeatable and is a repeatable success. But I think I must say that in each implementation we learn something from our clients. Now, I think maybe Shalendra would like to apply for the IP for his USA method, but I think this is one of the example how we enhance our capabilities learning with our clients. Absolutely, I think the whole process is a repeatable process. So, the domain expertise which we bring to table, they're the people who have worked with planners for years. They can talk to them in their language, talk about the nuances of the plan, get that information upfront from the minds of the planners. And on tech side, as Shalendra explained, Bhavna explained, the platforms like Blue Yonder are extremely powerful, so you need to have a good knowledge of configurability of this platform. And therefore, this domain expert, we build it as pool and then we train them on these platform like Blue Yonder and make sure that they thoroughly understand this platform and to get the best value from it.The other piece is of course the data. I mean, if we can't get the data right, then obviously a lot of the stuff which we talked about may not succeed. The expertise to really understand right sources of the data, right quality of the data and establishing that upfront is also another critical factor. And finally, we spoke a lot about change management and I think Shalendra and Bhavna talked very specific nuances of understanding their day in life, understanding what is changing for them, what is their motivation, what are their objectives. And how do you align them, what is the new education required? Because at the end of the day they're doing the same planning, but they have to do it different way. They have to build the logic in the system so that system will do work for them and not do it themselves. I think that shift requires some preparation and change management plan, including KPIs and measurement right from the beginning. All these elements are absolutely repeatable and we have seen several successes using these methodologies.Samad Masood: But it sounds like there's the repeatable part and then there's also the specific cultural elements of each organization and their day in the life, the language they use, and it's got to be a combination of those two things.Rahul Ubgade: Absolutely.Samad Masood: I think we've got a great picture. Yeah, yeah,Rahul Ubgade: No, I think that I just want to add. That's where the internal leadership plays an important role because the external partner might take quite some time to understand the specific situation in the organization. Internal leadership brings that up to table and then the win-win partnership can come together.Samad Masood: And I suppose, Shalendra, that's something where you, you've provided the framework with this USA model. I think that helps a lot, doesn't it, to be able to, you're still taking the lead as the organization. And it's bringing in specific expertise and your training partner as well, Blue Yonder as well. Can you tell us, I mean, now this is well on its way now, but you've had lots of experience in your career, lots of other transformations. Just stepping away from this specific project, in the current market climate, what sort of advice would you give your peers or those listening to this webinar about the trends or things that you feel still need to be done in demand and supply planning? What do you think of the trends that are emerging as well?Shalendra Kumar: Okay, look, I have been thinking, and I've been having some discussions with Bhavna and Vijay and also in our Coca-Cola bottlers and company forums, et cetera. Now, I see let's say three, four trends, which are, let's say global trends or business needs. So, one is business is becoming more complex, selling is becoming more complex. When we are selling Coca-Cola or Nestle product or these are all becoming more complex. So, there are E-commerce customer, there are regular offline kind of supermarkets, there are small stores, they all need different kind of packs, different kind of combinations. So, doing business is more becoming more and more complex, and hence the need for automated intelligent planning system is becoming more important than ever. Because you could depend on a planner's mind to do it if it is a manageable SKU range. But then once SKU range and market complexity increases too much, drop sizes reduce, you need the help of IT solutions in order to work.I see the planning demand and supply planning solutions being called up to handle higher changeover, lower drop sizes, more complexity and faster response time expectations. That will impact the kind of lines people buy. I talked about dark lines, talked about this, robotic lines, we are talking, we used to talk about dark stores. We are not talking about dark lines. That's one business process change which the planning systems need to live up to and deliver.Second, in terms of an opportunity, AI is a big enabler. And today, including Blue Yonder, the planning solutions are coming with AI-enabled cognitive planning. So, a sales forecasting, which is as it is complex and becoming more complex with this SKU proliferation. We see a huge jump shift happening in capabilities on this AI-enabled cognitive modules taking weather into account, taking events into account, taking several factors, multivariate input and forecasting.Third, I will call it ecosystem orchestration. We have, let's say a number of, every country for production has let's say 200 suppliers, somebody supplying labels, somebody supplying cans, somebody supplying glass bottles, et cetera, crowns. This ecosystem orchestration is important. And at this moment API-based integration company to company is becoming more and more important so that you're not sending emails and Excel files. It's called all going automated with whatever supplier, portal, vendor portals, et cetera.And fourth, I think this is another thing which we learned in this whole process, the systems should continue to become more customer-centric and more human-centric. We convey to the employee that we are empowering you to do more. We are not trying to automate everything and we are empowering you to do more. There is, like I explained, in our process the planners had a huge thing to properly define the UDPs and simulate and check. The way you work will keep changing. Rather than making 20 changes in the plans once the output comes, you make changes in the UDPs in the parameters which are going as an input to the, and that will need to continue to be done. This is what I see four major trends, more complexity, higher changeovers, cognitive planning, system orchestration through API connections, and human-centric customers.Samad Masood: That's pretty thorough I'd say, Shalendra. Rahul, is there anything for you to add there from your perspective?Rahul Ubgade: Yeah, no, I think it's quite a thorough one, but let me build on few of the topics on ecosystem. See, I think as you first had your standardized system, system of record in place, now you've got differentiation system also in place. The question is about how do you bring the ecosystem signals into your planning, right? So, which becomes on demand side, are you getting the consumer of tech signal into your planning? On supply side, are you able to get feeds from the suppliers on when and how the material is arriving? On logistics side, do you have signals on what's happening on in-transit stocks. And on different lanes, what is the availability of different transport capacity and stuff like that? When you bring all these signals together, and why this has become important is as Shalendra explained, that the world has become more complex, the supply side is complex, the demand side is getting complex, plus the expectation is that you have to get more efficiency.If you want to do that, then you have to actually work with more and more real-time signals. That's the first thing as I see which is happening. Building up on this UDP and different parameters for planning, that's another area where AI is becoming very powerful co-pilots for the planners. What happens is that it learns, it starts telling you that, "Look here, you use that UDP, but by the way, in three weeks back you had used that, that work better for you." And how do you get that embedded as part of the planning process? That's the evolution. We're already doing multiple pilots in that space and that should be the area to focus on because I think the whole learning cycle with this algorithms have become much shorter and you can bring that in very rapidly.And finally, the lines are started to blur between planning and execution. What happens is that you do an ideal world plan and then you find something didn't happen as per plan, and that's where the control tower comes in the play, which gives you real-time signals across your value chain to say, "Okay, what's not gone right and what you can do to solve it." And you solve the exception to some extent. Now, ultimately with the provision of inventory and with the provision of exception management, you are able to achieve a certain service level with given inventory.And somebody asked, a leader, a very senior leader in the business of CPG company asked me, "What is the best-in-class case filtrate?" I said, "98.5." His question was that why it can't go beyond that? And I gave a very standard answer, "Yeah, there is a trade-off, because then your cost of inventory will go up." He said, "Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I've been hearing that for very long, but what if you have better flexible system which can respond quickly and solve it?" I think that leaders are now challenging to bridge and blur the gap between planning and execution and bring them closer and solve even those exceptions to the maximum extent. I think that's where the leaders will start challenging to get even better outcome and better efficiency. And that's where I see things going.Samad Masood: Yeah, exciting times. Bhavna, what about your perspective? What do you see in the future?Bhavna Sharma: Yeah, so most of it is perfectly covered by both of the panelists. I will just touch upon this maybe further from the ecosystems, like disruption we have seen in COVID times, and we have seen it now on various occasions. Disruptions in supply chain is becoming now more common. So, thus to combat organizations have to be hosting a more mature supply chain, a supply chain that is more resilient, more agile to respond to these changes. The key trends that are there that have been covered, like sustainability, AI/ML, IoT, they are the ones which are actually the focus point of the various solution providers as well. They are using and leveraging these trends to improve the decision making and planner experience, right?I'll just give you a little bit live examples of AI/ML. I mean, if you have to do a mundane task of a supplier selection and a risk assessment, you can use AI, you can evaluate suppliers' performance, their financial reports and news articles through AI and even a bigger thing, data science. So, the AI enables them to have data management done through AI/ML tools, which is data normalization, education and all. So yeah, that's about it, yeah. Thank you.Samad Masood: Thanks, Bhavna. We're coming to the end now. Shalendra, I want to ask you the last question from myself. For those listening or who may be in your situation or entering a digital transformation, a large digital transformation, what recommendations do you have for someone taking on a role that you've had? What are the takeaways that they should take from this?Shalendra Kumar: I'll say, let's say five items. One is, understand business. Value is not delivered by the tool, value is delivered in the business when it is executed. So, understand this business is one part. Second, as I mentioned in Blue Yonder and more and more of such tool, configuration of the solution is the key, configuration. Sometimes it loosely called master data, garbage in, garbage out, but I like the term better configuration. So, get your planner's mind into the algorithm. So, configuration is key. And when we said understand business, good understanding of the business enables right configuration. Configuration is not about coding, it is about UDP is what we talked about, user defense. It is loosely or generally called data quality, but I prefer to call it configuration so you can figure it right.Third, I have seen time and again sometimes particularly for system of differentiation as Rahul explained, the system of record of system of differentiation. If an SAP, ERP is not working, you will not be able to print invoices and have your truck out. But in a system of differentiation, you need to check it on some criteria. Like I said, production smoothening like inventory levels, like service level 98.5, or 99, or 99.5, or 95. You have your acceptance criteria very well-defined. Otherwise, when you are implementing, the user will pick at an item which may be 2% impact, but which is not looking good and say, "Nothing is working, software coding is all wrong."Fourth, I will say is invest in technology, keeping in mind that you're trying to improve decision making by humans, decision making also by people in your organization.And fifth, I picked up again, Rahul said this, "Life is becoming more complex." The business and CEOs and the business managers are demanding more flexibility, faster response, and ability to handle more complexity without having inventory increases, et cetera. Be prepared how IT technology or manufacturing and logistic processes can respond to that. These are the five I would like to mention.Samad Masood: Great. Thank you so much, Shalendra, and thank you, Bhavna and Rahul as well. It's been a great conversation. I'm going to now just ask Liz to rejoin us and manage any questions coming from the audience. Thank you very much, everyone, and welcome back, Liz.Liz Dominquez: Hello. Yeah, thank you, Shalendra, Rahul, and Bhavna for all those great insights and Samad for moderating. Before we conclude today's presentation, we do have a few questions in the chat. Shalendra, this one's posed to you. Can you please explain how demand and supply planning varies for non-alcoholic ready-to-drink beverages companies versus other food and beverage and CPG companies?Shalendra Kumar: Okay, thank you, Liz, and thank you for this question, Sandeep, I believe, yes, Sandeep. Hi, Sandeep. Look, let me just explain a bit of a business context. And I told you three years I was running strategy for 28 countries, which involved many countries in Europe and also in Africa, and also Russia, et cetera. Let me explain the context. Coca-Cola by kilogram or by weight or by volume is one of the cheapest product to be manufactured and transported. Imagine you can make cars, cars, the volume of the truck which transports 20 cars versus same volume which a car takes, and the value of the car versus value of the Coca-Cola for the same volume which a car takes to transport.Because of this, and car was not such a good example, but even on some CPG products, detergents are higher value or there are other things which are higher value compared to beverages. And I'm not talking about coffee or tea, but I'm talking about liquid, ready-to-drink beverages. And hence, distributed manufacturing becomes important. We have 29 countries, largely eastern and Central Europe, Russia, Nigeria, Egypt, and we have about 65 manufacturing plants with a 10 billion Euro turnover. Many other companies with similar turnover with similar kind of maybe 28, 29 countries may have 10 plants, not 55. Why? The cost of logistics is not so high, the cost of transportation is not so high for them. For us, the cost of transportation as a percentage of our revenue becomes very high because of the volume phenomena.And hence, we are, our supply and demand planning becomes more complex. We have to work with very low inventories. We have to work with distributed manufacturing nearly in many countries out of our 29 countries, and try to limit the distance to which we move product. As compared to, as I said, some other CPG companies who may be doing it. And that's a variation in a NARTD beverage company. It could be Coca-Cola, it could be mineral water, it could be ice tea versus other CPG companies. If you're making nor Knorr soups and selling in the sachets, the cost of transportation ain't so high. And all this cost of transportation then and distributed manufacturing, distributed distribution puts its own requirement and complexities in terms of, we have 360 depots, the warehouses, how much inventory you maintain in every warehouse, how much service level, how do you maintain the service level, et cetera. That's the nuances of this industry versus other industry. Maybe if Rahul has some other comment he can mention.Rahul Ubgade: No, I think you have explained it quite comprehensively with good examples, so nothing further to add.Liz Dominquez: Great, thank you, Shalendra for that added context. We have another one here. What are some of the barriers that exist to digital transformation and consumer goods supply chains? Shalendra, do you want to take that one, or someone from the Infosys team too?Shalendra Kumar: Okay, look, some of the barriers I can mention my perspective. Data is one of the barriers Rahul mentioned, and we're trying to address this data thing. IoT sensors, we have digital twins on production lines now. We have, when you do a digital twin, the number of sensors addition which you have to do. Then data standards. One thing I realized while doing a manufacturing digital platform was that there was some production equipment which were following the latest data standard where there was some other older production equipment which are not following that data standards. Even if you have those sensors, taking it all into a server and doing the computational aspects for meaningful analysis, that was. So, data and capturing that data, storing that data is becoming ... Is a complexity of digital transformation.Second, I define not involving user enough and not trying to get the user decision-making process. The example of Blue Yonder I can see in other areas also. That is a barrier to digital transformation. Companies do digital and people still keep using Excel. You've gone into a very sophisticated tool, spent millions, and people are still taking their decision making by Excel. So, keeping that in mind.And third, I will say in digital transformation, and I know many companies are doing it, we are doing it in Hellenic, create a digital friendly employee workforce. Now, we are trying to have this, let's say, generative AI kind of large language model, licenses available to people who are more friendly and accepting for this so that people ... Or we're having digital academy or data DIA, data analytics academy, so as to get people to start understanding these new emerging technologies. Because the more people understand, the more they are willing to embrace this technology and can appreciate how they can use it in business. And that helps the digital transformation. Thank you, Liz.Rahul Ubgade: I would just like to build on that. I think they're really wonderful points, so I'll just increase the weight of stakeholder to also include partners. Because as you extend into the ecosystem with retail partners, suppliers, how do you bring them also on board in your journey with what is in it for them and what is the win-win formula for them? And then finally, not challenging enough to reimagine, because I think there is always a proven well-oiled machinery of the past. Unless that gets challenged to reimagine and do something different using the tech, that can be a barrier to not getting the desired outcome.Liz Dominquez: Great, thank you so much, Rahul and Shalendra. We have another question here. Can you share some best practices for introducing autonomous tech support within the supply chain?Shalendra Kumar: Okay, well, autonomous supply chain, we are a bottler of Coca-Cola with a large Europe footprint, and hence lot of autonomous supply chain initiatives make sense. I've talked about some of them and I talked about automated, I talked about driverless forklift, automated guided vehicle. We are using it in Ireland and we are using it in Austria. I've talked about automated warehouse system, what is called dark stores. So, there are no manpower. It is run by robots and with SAP system integrated with the warehouse management system. We have eight of them in different countries. From dark stores we are investing into what we call our initiative toward dark lines, which is again going for robotic controlled, robotic managed lines where you can do changeovers, et cetera by themselves.We have an excellent, excellent use case in quality. We call it real-time autonomous quality management. We have been implementing it for the last four years, which is based on, normally quality control used to be based on, this is a can, pick up a sample from the line, test this can, how much gas volume is there, how much sugar is there or how much whatever parameters, or how is the ... And now we have these sensors where by the temperature, by picking different parameters as the production line is running using statistical process control, you predict whether the quality of this beverage and this package is right or not. There are a number of things happening. Let's say, let me talk about, not exactly fully autonomous, but augmented reality. I talked about remote maintenance and remote maintenance support. We have had situation where we have a breakdown in production line in Nigeria, in Lagos in Nigeria, and our engineers sitting in Poland or a supplier engineer sitting in Germany are able to help solve that breakdown in Nigeria because we have this remote maintenance support using the smart glasses.We also had, we have used the smart glasses in picking. When you are supplying to a retailer in a pallet, you may have five crates of Coca-Cola, two crates of Fanta, two packs of coffee, et cetera. So, you have to configure and make all of this, and this used to be a manual process, so we have got using smart glasses we have made the life of those picking personnel easier. And that has given us 15% productivity improvement, 99.9% accuracy. Again, so there are a number of them, but today autonomous and technology guided processes are becoming the theme of the day.Liz Dominquez: Perfect. Thank you, Shalendra. In the last few minutes that we have, we have one more question. As we move toward the industry 5.0 road map and integrate some of technologies that we mentioned earlier, how can supply chain executives communicate the value of investments to their leadership team and stakeholders? Rahul, why don't you start us off with that one, and then, Shalendra you can add your finishing thoughts there?Rahul Ubgade: Sure. I think that's a excellent question. The point is that the engagement with the leaders have to be based on the business outcomes. And don't worry, if you don't engage they're going to challenge you anyways. I think as long as the discussion is about, how can I impact business outcome, you have all ears of the leaders. So, you have to translate all this intervention into a simple language in terms of what change will happen in the business and how it will impact the outcome which matters most for these leaders, right? As long as that simple communication is brought in and preferably brought to life with actually running it in their organization with their data, the credibility will be much higher for them to accept it. And obviously, I think a lot of leaders are seeking more strategic view about it, a long-term view about it. But I think unless it is stitched with the business outcome and that is the top line of the story, it becomes very difficult to have that communication.Shalendra Kumar: Liz, you asked me to comment on this. Let me comment what we are doing on this in Hellenic. First of all, I think like most companies, any business case for IT investment has to go through a business case approach where you make a fiat file, you give ROIC, you give a payback period, et cetera of that investment. Then that's scrutinized by business leaders and teams responsible for that. That I think happens in most organizations, happens. In Hellenic, I will tell you particularly with the context of digital transformation. Two other things, one is at our executive lead team basis, at our group leadership basis, whether CEO and all CSO people, we have a quarterly digital steer code where we give update on the digital initiatives which we have, how have they been performing, how are they delivering value versus what we had indicated in the business case and what are our new future business cases? That's at an executive level on the top for this 28, 29 countries.Now, the other thing which we have found it very interesting is having the junior and middle management and a country senior management employee talking about the value from digital, because that we see also helps in adoption and also helps in value delivery and value extraction. We have a program, we call it DAVID. DAVID means digital for D, adoption, A, value, insight, and delivery. Now, as a part of this we encourage and train and motivate our IT employees in countries to talk in the country monthly reviews, in the various meeting, in a supply chain meeting or a commercial meeting or a finance meeting how the products, the digital products which have been installed in that country, how they are delivering value. We have now a situation where a lot of employee population is talking about how digital is creating value and what kind of value it has created for my country. Thank you.Liz Dominquez: Thank you so much. I'd like to thank all of you again, Shalendra from Coca-Cola Hellenic, as well as the Infosys team for this engaging discussion. Stay tuned for the replay, and we hope you'll join us for the next CGT webinar.

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