QCNEWS
Telefónica and Würth España ran the hybrid quantum classical pilot at a La Rioja parts warehouse, cutting boxes by 3%, truck space by 7%, and cardboard by 6%, on 14% of orders.
At a Würth España parts warehouse in Agoncillo, La Rioja, a hybrid quantum-classical pipeline repacked about 14% of roughly 6,000 orders. The result is small enough to be honest, and real enough to count as a 2026 industrial-quantum data point rather than a press-release abstraction.
The numbers, drawn from a pilot with Telefónica, applied-research partner TECNALIA, and quantum-software platform QCentroid, are modest by design. Shipping boxes came down about 3%, truck transport volume by up to 7%, and cardboard consumption by more than 6%, all measured against the warehouse's existing routing rather than a best-case scenario (Telefónica press release).
The mechanism is what makes the pilot worth reading. Würth España ships an industrial-supply catalog, fasteners, tools, and fixings, in mixed orders to tradespeople and small businesses. Finding the smallest box for a mixed list of items is a combinatorial packing problem: the search space explodes with each new item, and classical software has to approximate. The pilot routes that search through QCentroid's QuantumOps platform, which orchestrates quantum solvers alongside classical AI heuristics. A quantum machine is not packing boxes. A solver is searching a denser part of the packing tree, and the rest of the work still runs on ordinary code.
The work ran at Telefónica's Javier Echenique Quantum Technologies Talent and Technology Center in Bilbao, the carrier's industrial-quantum hub inaugurated in January 2026. Telefónica is positioning the center as a venue where Spanish enterprises run real workloads on emerging quantum hardware, and the Würth pilot is one of its first supply-chain tenants (TelecomTV coverage). TECNALIA, the Basque applied-research group, brought optimization expertise. QCentroid brought the orchestration layer that turns a quantum algorithm into a runnable job.
The 14% share matters. A reader can be forgiven for hearing "quantum" and assuming the warehouse was repacked end to end. It was not. The pipeline improved packing on roughly 840 of the 6,000 orders in the test set, and the savings percentages apply to that slice. The other 86% ran on the warehouse's existing systems (Telefónica). At a single facility, on a partial pilot, 3% fewer boxes and up to 7% less truck space translate to real cardboard and diesel savings. They do not describe a logistics transformation.
What they do describe is the shape of industrial quantum in 2026: a real combinatorial problem, a real customer, a hybrid pipeline where quantum handles the search step a classical algorithm would approximate, and a measured result a finance team could put on a slide. Telefónica calls it one of the first industrial quantum use cases at the Bilbao center, the same language a hyperscaler would use for a single-tenant pilot. The 3–7% band is roughly the size such pilots print at before the workflow is rolled out wider (TelecomTV).
The next milestone is whether the 14% share expands across Würth España's order mix, and whether the savings hold when item variety and seasonality change. The Telefónica release flags the approach as extensible to other supply-chain and industrial decisions. The open question is which of those decisions have the same combinatorial structure as the packing problem, and which do not.
For now, the La Rioja pilot is the smallest honest unit of industrial quantum in supply chain: a single warehouse, a single problem, a hybrid pipeline, and savings modest enough to publish.