Drink-IT – the secret behind Heineken's successful expansion in emerging markets

Expanding Heineken's global presence through acquisitions in emerging markets challenged its ERP strategy. How do you combine the ERP demands from a global corporation with the ones from new smaller entities - while ensuring high pace and low costs? Heineken found the perfect mix by adding the easy-to-use and fully integrated software solution, NORRIQ’s Drink-IT.

A twofold ERP approach

After an intensive market evaluation in 2008, Heineken choose a twofold Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) approach and decided to roll out the software solution for breweries, Drink-IT, in all the new subsidiaries. This way their corporate ERP system, running all the common processes, was complemented by a cost-effective and easy-to-implement beverage management solution that supported the entire value chain in the subsidiaries.

Today Drink-IT is released in 19 of Heineken's subsidiaries in the African Region and the Caribbean, and the approach has proven to be a key competitive factor with many advantages for Heineken. It enables their subsidiaries to deploy faster and to a significant lower cost. The solution is flexible, easy-to-use, and provides the smaller entities industry-specific functionalities and templates based on best practices from beverage companies around the world.

Low cost and high value

Especially in the African Region the population and industry were highly dependent on manual processes and Drink-IT was a fast way to automate and unlock the power of the extremely value-adding solution, designed to address all the unique challenges of the beverage industry. In the Caribbean region, a homogenization was looked for by replacing solutions like Exact.

The implementations went smoothly and Heinekens employees embraced the solution very fast. In comparison, a corresponding implementation of an SAP solution would take well over a year and involve a high level of complexity adjusting the solution to the needs of a smaller brewery. The implementation of Drink-IT however only took between 6 and 9 months as the solution is already tailor-made for the industry, easy to adjust and based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV, making the roll out highly efficient and the system easy to learn and use.

Meanwhile, Heineken is implementing its 3rd version of HeiLite, Heineken’s name for Drink-IT. This shows how Heineken has built trust in the solution and how the interactive discussion between NORRIQ and Drink-IT results in a solution that creates a continuous better fit for Heineken’s needs.

Project roll-out

For many years, Heineken worked with partners for the roll-out of the solution in different countries. Two years ago, it decided not only to use NORRIQ’s Drink-IT solution but also to use the Drink-IT project team, that built its experience on international accounts in the past years, for roll-outs in Africa.

The ability to maximize every opportunity

To sum up, Drink-IT offered all the functionalities that Heineken needed, it enabled them to manage and boost their business in a complex environment characterized by a parent operation and their subsidiaries having different business needs and circumstances. They now have the ability to enter new markets with a simple solution in an affordable way - extremely fast and capable of maximizing every opportunity for growth.