Wilko Sierksma holds a degree in econometrics, in KLM’s Operations Research department. “Before HEINEKEN, I spent five years with KLM, where my days were filled with capacity management, optimization and planning, both in operations and on the commercial side of things.” Sierksma subsequently delved into supply chain production, serving as planning manager for all production facilities in the Netherlands. This is his seventh year with HEINEKEN Global Supply Chain. “It’s a very decentralized business and in the past, no two countries had the same standards. However, you can only roll out cross-country platforms if you have uniform data, which was one of my main pursuits for a long time. I’m still on the HEINEKEN Data Board, which works out the company’s data strategy.” He is now the company’s Director of Global Planning: “We develop planning capabilities – processes, IT, configurations – and roll them out across all countries. We were one of the first departments at HEINEKEN to develop a global platform that enabled cross-border harmonization. By 2024, 95% of all volume will have been integrated into a global planning platform, enabling us to quickly and easily generate regional and global insights. In the past, if we wanted to know how many cans would be needed in Asia over the next three months, we would have to delve into the local planning systems and do a manual count. Things are a lot easier now.”

In the past, network design was mainly a matter of financial optimization, Sierksma recalls: “You’d capture reality in a mathematical model, work out production costs at site A and site B and factor in transportation costs before doing a run to determine the best option. Things are considerably more complex nowadays, if only because you have to consider more qualitative factors that play a role in decision-making. Water, for example, is an important raw material for beer. If you open a brewery with a 50-year lifespan, you have to be sure that you’ll have water for the next 50 years too, but those sorts of predictions can be difficult to make. Does it make sense to open a brewery in an area that may be plagued by water scarcity in the foreseeable future? There’s a chance that the local government may cut off part of the water supply to a brewery because it deems direct water use to be more important, and rightfully so.” HEINEKEN now also pays more heed to import duties, energy, geopolitics and other factors when deciding where to open new facilities: “Factoring in more and more parameters also complicates the modeling process: you have to map out all contributing factors, list the pros and cons, and compare different scenarios to give decision-makers a detailed view of all the risks involved.”

Centralized insights

Regional presidents turn to Sierksma's team to lead such investigations. “We do the math and provide substantive input, based in part on work done by internal and external experts. What we do is facilitate discussions. The four regions each operate independently, but the executive team is always brought in for major investments and for decisions on closing or opening breweries. Naturally, the country in question is also given a seat at the table. In this changing world rife with uncertainty, being able to investigate these issues quickly is a massive boon. That’s why we’ve invested significant sums in data standardization and made sure that all the key data we need for studies is already available. We have also developed the Brewery Capacity Model (BCM), an application that all countries have to update twice a year to provide insight into capacity, facilitate decision-making and aid in planning and expediting allocation studies. All the assets, all the brand-specific forecasts – we have them all already.” The availability of qualitative data unlocks all these new use cases that prove how valuable centralized data can be, Sierksma explains: “Take returnable packaging, for example. If you grow, you know you’ll need more crates, too. We already have a lot of the data we need in BCM to calculate future needs.”

HEINEKEN’s commitment to net-zero breweries by 2030 has also radically changed the planning landscape. “You need a lot of money and a lot of answers to get there: how can we optimize our energy footprint, what is the cost of greening and which assets should we target? And that’s before you realize that the answers differ across countries and continents. In the past, our studies didn’t factor in the availability of renewable energy or the costs of converting breweries to run on green energy.” In the years to come, HEINEKEN will face two major challenges, Sierksma points out: “Reducing scope 1 and scope 2 emissions and all the CRSD and ESG reporting that comes with it. It’s a mammoth task. We’ve already identified each brewery’s emissions and available assets, we have detailed plans for individual breweries and know exactly what it will take to be climate neutral by 2030. Now it’s time to act.”

On the eve of unprecedented change

The second challenge, which might just be even greater, is harmonizing data, processes and systems across the company: “Before this, HEINEKEN used more than 3,500 different apps. We’re now looking to merge 45 different ERP systems into one, on top of whittling down 3,500 apps to 50 universal platforms and a small number of bespoke products. The transition to a single ERP core with a scattering of platforms is an enormous undertaking. We’re now on the eve of this transformation, and the process has almost been completed when it comes to planning. Crucially, however, we’re one of the few functions that have managed to push ahead with global harmonization so far.” And the benefits have been tangible: “Rapidly rolling out a use case across 75 countries clearly has many advantages. The IT changes and change management involved, however, are not to be underestimated. The trick is to safeguard local entrepreneurship and the innovation it fosters, while standardizing processes. Ultimately, you want to combine the strengths of a local and central approach. You could compare it to the Navy Seals: it’s about running a tight ship and operating as a group, pursuing the same mission without sacrificing agility and flexibility.”