HEINEKEN is a strong digital innovator with thousands of customized applications and automations built on Power Platform by over 7,500 makers.
As the number of makers and applications grew, Managed Environments capabilities were deployed, enabling a small product team of just five people to manage over 8,000 environments.
Power Platform solutions have contributed 3.1 million hours in increased productivity, while advanced, AI-powered agents are supporting both employees and customers.
HEINEKEN is the number one brewer in Europe and the second largest brewer in the world. With more than 90,000 employees, the company owns, markets and sells more than 500 brands in 190 countries. Every day, over 25 million bottles of HEINEKEN are served across 192 countries.
As an industry leader, HEINEKEN is also a strong digital innovator. This includes low-code development of thousands of customized applications and automations on Power Platform. To date, over 7,500 makers have built over 10,000 applications with Power Apps and more than 42,000 flows using Power Automate.
Applications have been created to support everything from safety on the brewery floor, to product quality control, data accuracy, fraud detection, customer satisfaction, even workspace and parking space reservations.
Power Platform has been a key part of HEINEKEN’s development platform for five years. With Microsoft 365, employees jumped at the opportunity to start developing their own applications on Power Platform. As the number of applications quickly grew, the central Power Platform team recognized the need for a more controlled development approach.
Using the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit, the team set up a new, multi-tiered environment structure.
All employees start in a personal productivity environment for apps with 1-20 users. Apps that grow beyond 20 users are moved to a shared production environment with more formal DevOps processes. Enterprise-wide applications with 100+ users are developed in a dedicated production environment. These apps are subject to more oversight but, at the same time, expert makers can leverage a multitude of connectors and other advanced capabilities.
Additionally, the new governance structure includes federated environments. In this way, regional teams with in-depth experience on Power Platform can apply their own layer of governance to projects such as local languages considerations and policies.
As the number of makers and applications grew, Managed Environments capabilities were deployed to help the management team keep up with demand. “With Managed Environments and our new governance model, we are able to manage over 8,000 environments with a relatively small product team of just five people,” says Jakub Jakubowski, Power Platform Technology Lead at HEINEKEN. “This enables our HEINEKEN makers to ship their solutions securely while we maintain governance and continue to scale our digital transformation with Power Platform.”
Today, HEINEKEN is leveraging almost all of the capabilities in Managed Environments which cover a wide range of management and governance scenarios. A few notable examples:
Employees who want to become makers are now automatically moved to their own personal environments using environment routing. The company’s 20-user limit is enforced automatically with limit sharing which triggers alerts to app owners to move their app to a production environment. And with pipelines in Power Platform, makers now have a much easier way to move apps to production environments without having to use more complex Azure DevOps pipelines. Makers also benefit from solution checker - a comprehensive quality monitoring and remediation tool.
“Managed Environments has greatly simplified and improved our ability to govern Power Platform at scale. It’s the best way to manage at a global level,” says Giada Binelli, Hyperautomation Tribe Lead at HEINEKEN.
In addition to Managed Environments, the central team created a self-service portal. The portal provides makers with details about their Power Platform solutions, including governance alerts such as clean-up requirements needed for inactive apps. The portal also enables makers to enter details about time and cost savings generated by using their solutions.
“Managed Environments has greatly simplified and improved our ability to govern Power Platform at scale. It’s the best way to manage at a global level.”
Giada Binelli, Hyperautomation Tribe Lead, HEINEKEN
With a strong governance structure in place, HEINEKEN has been able to accelerate Power Platform development and build more mission critical apps.
Take their logistic trade term validation app, for example. HEINEKEN processes tens of thousands of orders every day. These orders must comply with logistic trade terms like minimum order quantities, lead times, and full truckloads. The team wanted a more efficient way to check a growing number of orders, replacing time-consuming manual checks in Excel and SAP.
A solution was developed using Power Apps and Power Automate to check orders against trade terms automatically. The app can be personalized by language, time zone, and data formats. Dataverse is used to securely store master data such as customer details, units, channel, materials, SKUs. Power BI provides reporting (e.g. monthly, quarterly) which can be exported to MS Excel file format for further analysis.
The system is capable of processing thousands of orders a day. “Our logistic trade term validation app on Power Platform saves hours and hours of work and boosts transport efficiency, while at the same time driving operational excellence within our supply chain,” says Tom Winter, Global Customer Service Capability Lead at HEINEKEN.
HEINEKEN has also been extensively leveraging the AI capabilities in Power Platform. HEINEKEN’s AI initiatives follow the same rigorous governance and security policies as with all Power Platform projects. These include Copilot Studio capabilities for bias mitigation, data privacy, and ethical considerations, ensuring responsible AI practices. For example, Copilot Studio makes it easy for makers to add rules using natural language to control exactly what topics employees can cover with AI-driven agents.
AI at HEINEKEN helps employees access information faster and automate repetitive steps, freeing up time for strategic and creative activities while maintaining human oversight. Most recently, the company used Copilot Studio to engineer an exciting evolution – from a basic internal chatbot launched almost two years ago to an advanced, AI-powered agent that the company calls its ‘PowerBot’.
The project began with a series of simple prompts that make it easier for employees to search for internal resources. A library of templated prompts has greatly expanded the scope of the agent and employees can now save their own prompts. They can access the agent through Teams and also through a custom web app.
Employees are thrilled with the boost in productivity. Sabine van Woerden, Director, Legal Innovation at HEINEKEN works with PowerBot every day for help with a diversity of topics. “Using the agent is like having a super smart and efficient intern on your team," she says. In the beginning, she used PowerBot for basic tasks such as meeting summaries. Today, she leverages it for more advanced tasks such as proposal generation. “Our PowerBot agent has boosted efficiency and generated higher-quality proposals in a short timeframe,” says van Woerden.
“Our PowerBot agent has boosted efficiency and generated higher-quality proposals in a short timeframe.”
Sabine van Woerden, Director, Legal Innovation, HEINEKEN
Along with internal agents, HEINEKEN has also developed external agents on Copilot Studio for customers. An agent developed for the Dutch market of the company’s Amstel Brewery division is embedded directly in Amstel’s website. The agent handles frequently asked questions from customers. If the agent cannot answer a question, the customer is automatically transferred to the division’s customer contact system. This is done using a pre-built handoff skill in Copilot Studio.
With its efficiency for handling of FAQs, the agent has reduced calls to the call center and is returning approximately 300 hours per year back to the company. What’s more, customers are getting the information they need faster, leading to higher satisfaction scores.
As with all projects, the flexibility of Power Platform and tight integration with Azure is key. As Binelli explains, “With Microsoft Copilot Studio, we’re able to build re-usable skills and make them easily accessible for makers to enhance their agents and other AI-driven projects on Power Platform.” She describes another skill which enables makers to snap Azure AI Search capabilities into their agent to expand search capabilities and fine tune performance.
HEINEKEN is also embedding AI capabilities directly into apps. One app, for example, uses Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models to map marketing claims against company policies and assist the legal team with approvals. Additionally, the app provides proactive advice on addressing any identified issues, significantly enhancing efficiency and ensuring compliance.
As part of the company’s Power Platform governance platform, apps, flows and agents are tracked using Power BI dashboards which build on workflows from the COE toolkit. All data is brought into Microsoft Fabric which the team uses to customize their dashboards. They can even drill into specific usage patterns such as conversations being driven by specific agents, including PowerBot.
The dashboard is also used to track real business value. Feedback from solution owners that is collected in the self-service portal is compiled directly into the dashboard. Since HEINEKEN started measuring the return of hours, Power Platform has contributed 3.1 million hours in increased productivity.
Building on the success of these metrics, HEINEKEN is busy expanding its use of Power Platform and related Microsoft technologies. For example, the team is currently evaluating Plans in Power Apps - an AI-powered tool that enables users to build apps simply by describing their business needs in natural language. “We have been testing Plans in Power Apps and really see the potential to increase our speed to market for Power Platform solutions and even grow our whole global footprint,” says Binelli. Meanwhile, work on a broader GenAI platform continues – which will enable makers to get even more out Power Platform tools like AI Builder and Copilot Studio.
As Binelli, says “Our makers are building amazing solutions on Power Platform while also meeting strict governance policies. It’s a brilliant balance that is generating big benefits for the business.”
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