In consumer centric organizations, how can we leverage AI for competitive advantage? Hear Leyla Delic of Coca-cola CCI present on computer vision and digital twins in manufacturing.
Leyla Delic:
Hi, everyone. It’s great to be part of this session. I’m sure there are going to be lots of valuable session. So I am Layla Delic joining you from Istanbul Turkey. I am part of Coca-Cola Icecek for the past three and a half years. I’ve been leading all things technology and my year before that has also been shaped within the technology. Coca Cola Icecek is one of the top bottlers within the Coca-Cola system, we are serving now 11 countries around 400 million consumers and many customers, close to probably 1 million customers around the geographies, Turkey, Central Asia, Middle East, and Pakistan and now we have a new country, Uzbekistan joining our organization.
Leyla Delic:
We have around 26 plants and this company has… CCI has been born out of Turkey, operating across these geographies. I joined three and a half years ago to start and lead the digital journey for my company. And it was… What a journey. So imagine being in FMCG and being a bottler for so many years and having the ambition of becoming a best FMCG in this geography to start with. That’s very ambitious and it’s a very meaningful vision to have for this company who knows how to operate, who’s so well connected with the customers and who has such a logistics infrastructure and network.
Leyla Delic:
So best FMCG. We are living in what I think all of us agree the digital era. So what does that mean when you are in a digital era and when you would want to be best in everything you do? So that for us translated into becoming a digital business. So what does that mean for CCI? We defined it under three key pillars, it was probably most of you had something very similar, but we had customer experience right in the epicenter. So we said we want to be a digital business, we have to put customer right in the epicenter and we have to first learn, understand and improve experiences. And as a result of all of that innovate new business models, innovate new product services, where we can leverage data and technology.
Leyla Delic:
As soon as you put customer experience in the epicenter of your strategy you have to make sure that you work very efficiently internally. So that meant that we had to make life easy for our employees. So customer experience without people experience won’t happen. So we focused on improving people experience and making life easy. And with that came our assets, our capital, the coolers and more importantly plants. Making sure that our raw material, what we produce, how we produce and utilization of four lines is also very efficient. All these three pillars leads directly into what we call transformation for growth which is enabling and ramping up new business models. So our digital strategy with customer experience, people experience, asset optimization, leading into new business models also meant we are going to improve, change, revolutionize our current operating model and ramp up new business models.
Leyla Delic:
Now all of this was encompassed with obviously cybersecurity, as most of you have it in your agenda, but very importantly it was based on data and technology. So we never used the words enabled, we always use the words we base our business and our company on data and technology. This translated into the type of skills that we need and what capabilities we are building. As we have embarked on this big revolutionary journey and started implementing foundational blocks from infrastructure technologies to data to these blocks of digital ecosystem with customer experience and focusing on B2B platform for our customers where we put the digital media layer to connect with our customers or to improve the touch points that we have with our customers and start measuring NPS.
Leyla Delic:
We focused on our plants and the assets, and that for us meant digital twin. With digital twin we are creating the virtual replica of our plants. And we make sure that we are focusing on maintenance management, quality management and production performance management, and sustainability. Sustainability became a direct and indirect improvement for a lot of the things we do with our digital twin and with the leverage of data and technology.
Leyla Delic:
So as I’m talking about all these blocks of digital strategy and some of the components of our digital ecosystem, everything is about collecting data and cleaning the data, but also leveraging that data. Even the ERP we were putting in, the global ERP we were putting in, the global CRM we are putting in and the advanced technologies where we are placing digital twin for our plants and digitizing that end to end supply chain. We started gathering a lot of data. So I prefer to call customer experience being passionately paranoid about customer. In parallel we were also passionately paranoid about data and about gathering as much data as possible. But once you have the data, it is inevitable that you have to apply some of the advanced technologies.
Leyla Delic:
AI obviously comes to mind very naturally and for a lot of the companies and digital functions obviously AI also sit in the middle of their data strategy. But we looked at AI not because everybody’s talking about it and everybody has it on their agenda but we truly believe that it is a competitive advantage. And for us it was augmenting what we do. We picked areas where we can actually capitalize on what AI can bring. So we didn’t go crazy trying to put AI and create many use cases, we were very targeted. Since we talk about customer experience and it was improving the experience but also creating a [inaudible 00:07:07] partnership, we placed AI in some of the predictions that we have for the market, for the forecasting, for the planning. And we placed AI very heavily in this digital twin platform infrastructure we are creating for the plants.
Leyla Delic:
What I would like to highlight here is everything that we do as the digital team here as CCI, we are looking at it as bringing and building capabilities for our company. So all these future sets that we develop as a technology team for us they turn into a capability when they start to generate an outcome. So some of the investments that we made in advanced technologies, maybe we’re not generating or are still not generating an ROI or the outcome, but we are looking at it as a key capability. You know I like to use the analogy of muscles. In the current era for us to be successful, more importantly for us to meet our ambitious vision and for us to continue stay relevant for our customers, for our employees and all our stakeholders, we need to make sure that we have relevancy and that relevancy means we have to build muscles, we have to build certain muscles. And some of the capabilities we have been building with advanced technologies, with AI, like I said before, maybe not necessarily bringing an ROI and outcome right away but it was very… It’s very critical to build that muscle.
Leyla Delic:
In 2019, years shortly after I joined I was presenting to the board and then I just had one page on AI saying, it’s a competitive advantage. And here are the few areas we’re going to focus on, let’s see what’s going to happen, I’m not able to commit to outcomes right away, but it’s something we have to learn as a company to be invested in skills. Like in many areas that we are working on together with my dear valuable team that has expertise in so many domains we are working with, with an approach of build, buy and partners. So there are certain areas where we have to be very competitive and we have to build intellectual property, that’s where we build ourselves. There are certain areas where it’ll be much faster if we partner with the right technology companies and then obviously there are areas where we just buy and build on top.
Leyla Delic:
For the partnership where we have ended up building lots of partners along this journey, what we care about is the company that’s open to co-innovation, corporation with us, who bring a lot of industrial know how, lots of skills from the current FMCG area and we want to make sure we leverage the technology know how of the partner and that’s a great co-innovation. And obviously the focus of the partner to innovate further, because we want to further develop. We will never be done in the current era and we don’t believe in being done ever.
Leyla Delic:
So as we were building some of these capabilities around AI, we believed in one of the capabilities that would add value to digital twin as well, which was computer vision. Computer vision for us was both important for the plants and for our coolers that are out there where we store our goods and make them available and make them cold and visible for our clients. So for both the coolers as an asset and our clients as an asset, bringing computer vision capability was very critical. Building this capability and being competitive by building it wasn’t going to make us go faster and we were not able to build that know how. So we came across Cuc and we started working on a proof of concept and remember discussing with the cuc team from day one was all about making us faster, otherwise it would make sense. And creating high quality output so that we can really talk about building a business capability.
Leyla Delic:
So like Cuc there are many other, both large size and startup and scale up companies where we partner in building the capabilities. Today we have achieved to build digital twin components of digital twin and multiple plants. We are receiving sustainability approach, we are receiving line utilization improvement, we are trying to decrease scrap and improve yield. We have launched our B2B platform, we are converting and transforming our current business model and also ramping up a new business model. We have automated many processes internally and we are on the way to make life easy for our employees. So we have started to achieve the critical outcomes by building these business capabilities and we’re going to continue to invest and stay on top of the developments of technology, invest in technology partner with companies, many companies, many technology companies and companies like Cuc to make us go faster in building business capabilities.
Leyla Delic:
And at the same time, we take the big responsibility in skilling our current team members, our employees across CCI, re-skilling, up-skilling, and also supporting the re-skill and up-skill of society to make sure that while we are relevant as a company and while we are trying to stay relevant for our customers, that our employees are also staying relevant with their skills, and all these partners are helping us to make sure that we are relevant, we build business capabilities and we have the relevant skills for our teams. Again, thank you for the invitation and hope to be in touch with all of you again very soon. Thank you.
