Infor Brews Up Strategic Scheduling Success for Heineken
5th March 2018
International brewer Heineken International has selected Infor Advanced Scheduling for a global standardization programme that will see the application rolled out to its breweries in 20 countries. Infor Advanced Scheduling is expected to play a key role in helping to harmonise and standardise approximately 90% of the operations in these breweries, helping Heineken to optimise capacity across this network, reduce production complexity and improve purchasing power.
The project is the latest phase of a relationship between Infor and Heineken that spans more than 20 years. Following a pilot in two breweries in Italy, Heineken now has a template to implement throughout operating companies across the globe.
Based on this template, and previous experience, Heineken expects to decrease levels of inventory of materials such as glass bottles by up to 40%, whilst improving capacity by up to 10% and helping enhance the consistency of workload scheduling in the breweries.
Heineken also uses Infor Advanced Planning as part of its sales and operational planning (S&OP) process. The brewer uses a monthly S&OP cycle that takes third party application data and experiments for various scenarios across 18 months, including promotions, capacity shifts and the introduction of new products.
“It is vital for us to reduce complexity in our operations and keep control of production,” said Ad van Delzen, strategic planner, Heineken. “Strategic applications such as Infor Advanced Scheduling mean that we can extend this control across our breweries and offer a route to improved profitability and much greater efficiency, without losing the individual characteristics of that brewery or beer.”