Learn, explore and unleash your inner chef.

What does the cooperation with the business, R&D, Quality & Engineering contribute to deliver true value change?

Coca-Cola HBC is a leading bottler of the brands of The Coca-Cola Company, selling more than 2 billion unit cases of beverages every year across a broad geographic footprint that covers operations in 28 countries.

For the supply chain function to produce and deliver on this scale, we need to manage materials and finished goods through 55 plants, 56 owned warehouses, and 113 distribution centres. This is a complex value chain driven by a clear commercial and overall business strategy.

Cooperation across the whole value and supply chain is essential and Supply Chain Finance as a business partner can contribute with fast reporting, clarity of data and evaluation of all options regarding business cases. Managing capital expenditure efficiently is critically important to maximise return on investment, enable innovation and to drive productivity and sustainability targets. We closely cooperate across all geographic territories in Coca-Cola HBC. Together with working capital efficiency, we contribute to free cash flow generation, which is important for a capital-intensive bottling business.
Of course, Finance also provides specific treasury solutions like the hedging of commodity and exchange rate risks.

What are the challenges of forging relationships with suppliers?

We consider our suppliers as vital partners, contributing to the ongoing and sustainable success of our business and maintaining our reputation with stakeholders. As a critical part of our value chain, the performance of our suppliers directly impacts the sustainability performance and commitments of Coca-Cola HBC. Under a unified procurement framework, we segment our supply base of around 35,000 suppliers into direct and indirect spend suppliers.

We need to ensure a very balanced approach to managing commercial requirements, competitive pressures, quality, sustainability targets, innovation and risk of non-performance. Our experience shows that a close working relationship with strategic suppliers is essential, combined with multi-year contracts. We strongly believe that the best and most sustainable relationships are based on success for both sides and having a highly professional procurement team to manage them locally, regionally and if needed globally.

What should suppliers know from Finance?

Suppliers must be able to fully assess the financial impact of a contract, related investment and potential risks of non-performance in terms of quality and quantity of supplies ordered. Understanding with whom you deal will need financial analysis of publicly available financial accounts, credit rating information and balance investments versus contract duration and size of the business. Finance as a business partner must support tenders, negotiations and then the execution of contracts and planning of financial impact during the business year. The total cost of ownership calculations will be important for investment decisions.

What would you like to achieve by attending the Supply Chain Controlling and Performance Management conference?

Every conference is an opportunity to gain insight, understand latest trends and to meet interesting people dealing with similar challenges on a day-to-day basis. Working in a large company can encourage an introspective approach and this is why it is important to understand what the industry and other companies are doing.

Learning from others has been very important in my career so far and is a core value in our company. This means that one must be open to sharing best practices and I am looking forward to presenting some of ours and learning from those of others during this upcoming conference in Berlin.