Data Lake / Data Warehouse Modernization · System Migration
HEINEKEN needed to modernize processes, data, and infrastructure at global scale so it could support Evergreen 2030, simplify operations across finance, supply chain, and commerce, and become the world’s best-connected brewer.
Reported impact
HEINEKEN drastically reduced deployment and provisioning times, shrank its data footprint, expanded automation, and created a more scalable digital operating model for global growth and better customer service.
IBM Consulting partnered with HEINEKEN to build a Digital Backbone that harmonizes process and data across the brewer’s global operations. The program combines a lean SAP S/4HANA core on Microsoft Azure with a modular hybrid cloud landscape, a centralized data lake, self-service analytics on Azure Data Lake, and reusable automation patterns across engineering and operations. IBM also helped establish an Agile DevOps delivery model and the Polaris services framework so deployments, provisioning, and future environment builds could be executed much faster and more consistently. On the data side, the teams defined blueprints for governance, architecture, and lineage, then added ingestion pipelines, technical engineering, training, and process optimization so business users could access more reliable real-time insight. HEINEKEN is also using IBM Consulting Advantage to introduce AI assistants and agents into delivery processes, turning the modernization program into a long-term operating model for faster execution, better customer service, and future AI-enabled digital operations.
Core finance, supply chain, and commerce processes run through SAP S/4HANA on Azure, operational and analytical data is ingested into Azure Data Lake and supporting pipelines, and the resulting insight is delivered through self-service analytics, automation use cases, and emerging AI-driven service agents.
“By implementing over 54 automation use cases, the company optimized storage and system performance”
“The partnership also established a self-service analytics platform on Azure Data Lake”
“Together, they established a lean and clean global SAP S/4HANA core on Microsoft Azure cloud.”
“deployment time plummeted by 95%, from 1 to 2 days to just 45 minutes.”
“hardware and virtual machine provisioning was accelerated dramatically, with provisioning time dropping from 10 to 15 days to under 5 minutes.”
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