My Company Project with Costa Express

From the classroom to a real business

I chose to apply for a project with Costa Express, where I worked with the supply chain team on spare-parts inventory management. Costa Express operates more than 15,000 self-serve machines across the UK and Ireland, so ensuring that the right spare parts are available when engineers need them is an important part of keeping those machines running. At the time, Costa was managing a large spare parts inventory, including some slow-moving items, and the project was focused on understanding how inventory could be managed more efficiently without compromising service levels.

This project was a hands-on experience that involved travelling to Coca-Cola’s HQ in London, the parent company of Costa, Costa’s HQ in High Wycombe, and WEEE Scotland in Glasgow, which manages a significant proportion of Costa Express’s inventory and spare parts. Visiting each of these locations gave me valuable insight into different parts of the business and made the experience particularly exciting.

Tackling a real supply chain challenge

My project focused on investigating whether Costa’s existing approach to inventory classification could be strengthened using data-driven analysis. I worked with internal spare-parts data and looked at factors including cost, stock levels and usage. I then compared Costa’s existing ABC classification with K-means clustering analysis to see whether a different approach could help identify the items that required the most attention.

What made the project particularly interesting was that I wasn’t simply analysing a theoretical case study. I was working with a real company’s data and trying to develop recommendations that could be useful to the business. The project involved preparing and cleaning the data, carrying out the analysis, interpreting the results and then translating those findings into practical recommendations for inventory management.

One of the key findings was that K-means identified a much smaller group of high-priority items than the existing ABC classification. This suggested that Costa could potentially concentrate forecasting, supplier collaboration and stock-control efforts on a smaller number of particularly important spare parts, while using the existing ABC system as a transparent baseline. My recommendations also considered areas such as risk-based cycle counting and reviewing differences between the ABC and clustering results.

Learning how supply chains work in practice

The technical side of the project was only part of the experience. I particularly valued the opportunity to interact with people working in supply chain management and learn from their experience. The Costa Express team were very supportive throughout the project. I was especially grateful to Matt, the 3PL supply chain manager, who was welcoming and willing to share information that helped me understand the business and its processes. This gave me a much better understanding of how a large organisation manages its supply chain and how inventory decisions can affect both cost and service.

The experience also taught me that being a successful supply chain professional requires more than technical knowledge. I had to communicate professionally with different stakeholders, ask questions, understand different areas of expertise and explain my findings clearly. Presenting recommendations based on my analysis was particularly valuable, as it pushed me to become more confident in communicating my ideas rather than simply producing an academic report.

Taking the experience beyond graduation

Looking back, the Company Project gave me something a traditional academic assignment could not: genuine experience of working on a business problem with a real organisation. It allowed me to apply what I had learned throughout my MSc to a real supply chain challenge, while developing my confidence, communication and problem-solving skills. It also gave me valuable experience to take into my career. Rather than simply saying I had studied supply chain management, I could talk about a real project, the data I had analysed, the challenges I had faced and the recommendations I had developed. That practical experience has stayed with me since graduating and made me feel more confident about taking the next step in my career.

I would absolutely recommend a Company Project to other students. It requires you to take ownership of your work and produce recommendations that are both academically sound and practically useful, but that is what makes the experience so rewarding. My advice would be to fully commit to the opportunity, learn from your company contacts and academic supervisor, and make the most of the professional skills you develop along the way.