Coca-Cola Enterprises Optimises Vehicle Routes for Efficient Product Delivery

Coca-Cola Enterprises Optimises Vehicle Routes for Efficient Product Delivery

By Goos Kant,Michael Jacks,Corne Aantjes

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An amazing 1.8 billion servings of Coca-Cola products are sold around the world every day,

according to Steve Buffington, Vice President of supply chain development and director of

supply chain, Bottling Investments Group for The Coca-Cola Company. Making sure that

every one of its thirsty clients gets the right product, at the right time and in the right price

range is Coca-Cola’s supply chain priority. The company manufactures and sells

concentrates, beverage bases and syrups to bottling operations, owns the brands and is

responsible for consumer brand marketing initiatives. The company has bottling partners

who manufacture, package, merchandise and distribute the final branded beverages to the

customers and vending partners, who then sell our products to consumers.The Coco-cola

company has outsourced its production and distribution to the CCE(Coco-coal enterprises)

which handles the responsibility of transferring the syrup from the coco-cola plants to the 64

bottling plants,and from here the bottled and canned beverages are transported to the 430

distribution centres and then to the 2.4 million retail outlets. The CCE uses the ORTEC’s

vehicle routing software which plans the routes of approximately 10,000 trucks daily and

saved costs around 45 million dollars.This led to a major improvement in customer service.

The remarkable point to be noted about the software is its transition from prior practices and

it handles the non standard constraints by customising it to the needs of the CCE.Due to the

immense success resulted in implementing this method,the CCE also adopted the software

to its other bottling companies.

The CCE developed the routing software by cooperative arrangement from the ORTEC

software company and Tilburg University.The ORTEC company provided the software and

looked after the implementation.The Tilburg University customised the software to CCE’S

specific