Heineken uses Angles for SAP for nearly every process

The Heineken Group is one of the world’s greatest brewers with 140 breweries in more than 70 countries, and a global network of distributors. While ‘Heineken’ is the principal international brand, the Heineken Group also brews and sells over 200 beers and ciders. Of the 125 million hectoliters sold by Heineken in 2009, approximately 14% was produced by Heineken Netherlands Supply (HNS) in 3 breweries in the Netherlands. In these 3 breweries, more than 900 SKUs are produced on 30 packaging lines and sold to over 150 countries.

Challenges

The management and staff members of HNS were looking for a more effective way to answer the myriad of ad-hoc questions that arose every day.

Questions such as:

• How to reduce working capital?
• How to improve departure schedule conformance for vessels from the Port of Rotterdam?
• Which delivery type produces the largest carbon footprint?

The objectives of HNS are to ensure that the business is:

• More effective – through doing the right things, and
• More efficient – through doing the right things in the right way

“We use Angles for SAP for nearly every process…It empowers our operating companies with self-service BI, and shows them where they can save a lot of money.”

Leonard Stein
Heineken International

Solution

Heineken and Angles for SAP

Heineken implemented Angles for SAP’s standard Operational Performance Management add-on, having initially used Angles for SAP to improve their data quality, data reliability and to quickly obtain difficult-to-access SAP data. Angles for SAP provides Heineken’s management team with the ability to quickly track, evaluate and understand the results of these KPIs, compare the performance with pre-set targets, and slice and dice the data using the dashboard’s powerful and intuitive drill-down functionality.

One unexpected and almost immediate side-effect from Angles for SAP’s use at Heineken was the rapid improvement in the user’s perception of, and attitude toward, SAP. Users suddenly saw the benefit of the SAP system more clearly and understood better how to manage it in a way that helps Heineken to effectively execute their daily processes.

S&OP and the Angles for SAP KPI Dashboard

Heineken found significant benefit from Angles for SAP is in supporting their Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process. Angles for SAP’s KPI Dashboard provides Heineken with the ability to easily access multiple input KPIs via an (internal) website of HNS. These KPIs include multiple stock overviews, customer service levels, supply chain lead times, and forecast accuracy and bias. These types of KPIs are usually notorious for being difficult to reach a consensus on how they should be interpreted and analyzed. Through using the new Angles for SAP ETL toolset, this wasn’t an issue, and it was solved with minimal effort. Now, Angles for SAP provides an overview of the most important KPIs in Heineken Netherlands that is subsequently presented at the S&OP meeting as a balanced scorecard.

“Angles for SAP and the KPI Dashboard help the management of the breweries to get a better grip on the overall performance of the supply chain, which will ultimately help Heineken Netherlands to service its domestic and international customers better against lower cost.”

Fred Holvast
Logistics Director at Heineken Netherlands

Results

In summary, Heineken obtained the following benefits from using Angles for SAP:

• Positive ROI from Angles for SAP achieved in weeks
• Increased business user acceptance and use of the SAP system
• Stronger grip on the overall performance of the supply chain
• Better insights into the integrated supply chain process
• Significant and immediate cash saving opportunities – without further expenditure
• Improved reliability in master data and transactional data

It also helped to support HNS’ two primary objectives, as follows:

1. Helping them be more effective (do the right things) by:

• Pre-setting required service and quality levels
• Being the best in class for new product introductions (i.e., cost level and time to market).

2. Helping them be more efficient (do the right things right) by:

• Being the best in class for productivity
• Ensuring sustained low (transfer) prices
• Reducing working capital

“The successful implementation of Angles for SAP has had many positive effects. Staff members now have a more accurate and up to date view of the achieved performance of HNS, which has motivated them to realize good scores. I also expect that the increased understanding of the relationship between the different KPIs will lead to a continuous optimization cycle.”

Anton De Romijn
Strategic Supply Chain Analyst at HNS