Coca-Cola HBC is one of the largest bottlers in the Coca-Cola system, selling more than two billion unit cases a year. Its warehouse work is mostly mixed-pallet picking: crates, shrink-wrapped bottle packs and cans assembled onto a single pallet for a delivery run. Pickers worked from paper lists, handheld radio-frequency scanners and tablets mounted on pallet jacks — methods the company identified as inefficient and as one source of picking errors. A wrong delivery costs twice: the rejected order comes back to the warehouse and a replacement has to be shipped.
In 2019 the company began an industrial augmented reality pilot at its distribution centre in Thessaloniki, Greece. A picking team there was equipped with RealWear HMT-1 assisted-reality headsets running Ubimax's vision picking application xPick — the product TeamViewer acquired in 2020 and now sells as TeamViewer Frontline Pick.
The picker sees the next item, its storage location and the quantity on a small display held in the line of sight, instead of looking down at a list or a scanner. To confirm the right location, the picker scans a QR code above the pallet with the headset's camera; the picked quantity is confirmed by voice command. Both hands stay free for the lifting itself. Orders are presented one step at a time and are pulled directly from Coca-Cola HBC's SAP warehouse management system, which also receives automatic status updates back. The backend integration was built together with Coca-Cola HBC's systems integrator, and the implementation used an agile approach with the pickers themselves involved throughout.
Results were reported quickly, though the published figures are not consistent with one another. TeamViewer states that picking accuracy reached 99.99% within two months of go-live. The June 2019 announcement of the Thessaloniki site gave the same accuracy figure and a 6-8% gain in picking performance in the first month, plus a higher double-digit percentage saving in capital expenditure against renewing the old scanner fleet — vision picking also avoided costly changes to warehouse infrastructure. RealWear puts the Thessaloniki performance gain at 7%. TeamViewer's own later narrative cites a 10% productivity increase, while the summary tiles on the same page say 6-8%.
Adoption mattered as much as the numbers. Coca-Cola HBC trialled pick-by-voice and other approaches first, and the pickers voted for vision picking. The combination of visual cues, voice interaction and simple scanning is credited with high engagement, and with faster onboarding of new staff — useful for a business with strong seasonal demand swings.
The pilot scaled in the same year it started: six further warehouses went live in 2019, reaching 29 warehouses by 2022 with at least five more go-lives planned for 2023. More than 1,000 pickers across 17 countries now work this way over multiple shifts, and Coca-Cola HBC describes vision picking as its standard warehousing technology rather than an innovation project.
