Digitising HEINEKEN's B2B Route-to-Market

Such digital interfaces help outlet owners to grow their businesses and/or simplify their lives. In addition, these are ways for HEINEKEN to maintain or establish direct (digital) relationships with outlet owners –  irrespective of the outlet’s size and geographical location.

The digitisation of these analogue business processes and the parallel build-up of the internal teams and processes followed a three-staged approach (see Exhibit 2 – Approach).

Firstly, we designed the overall transformation approach and roadmap. Activities included defining transformation principles, objectives and milestones, developing an end-to-end transformation plan with a detailed first-year roadmap, setting up the transformation organisation and governance and mapping out different route-to-market configurations. Finally, together with HEINEKEN’s leadership, three markets with distinct routes-to-market (direct, indirect with exclusive distributors and indirect with non-exclusive distributors) were selected to pilot the digital B2B RtM.

Secondly, we delivered the omnichannel foundation by initially “going live with Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) platforms and ecommerce businesses in the three selected pilot markets. This phase began with in-depth customer research in each of the three pilot markets to uncover current customer ways of working, and identify customer pain points and unmet needs. With these customer insights in mind, we supported HEINEKEN with the launch of a tender for building the MVP platforms for each pilot market and with guiding the build through an agile development process. In parallel with the build process, we prepared central and local organisations for the daily operation of the ecommerce businesses, having previously assessed the digital operational excellence gap (central and local) and steps required to close the gap. Lastly, we provided 3-6 months of on-the-ground support to each of the pilot markets to lead the go-live of MVPs in these markets, and to help establish core digital business operations, processes and teams (including build / recruitment of first capabilities).

The third stage consisted of two parallel streams: on the one hand, we supported the three initial pilot markets in gradually but ambitiously scaling their MVPs, digital teams and business operations towards mature, sizeable digital businesses; on the other hand, we supported new HEINEKEN markets in going live with similar MVP platforms and digital operations in multiple new markets across the globe. This work was always performed by joint SparkOptimus-HEINEKEN project teams working shoulder to shoulder in the market. In parallel with the latter, we also started rapidly transferring the skill of going live in new markets to a central HEINEKEN team. By onboarding a fast-growing team of HEINEKEN internal ‘deployment specialists’, we embedded this skill within HEINEKEN, which allowed SparkOptimus to start focusing on the next stage: monetisation of the digital B2B RtM.

In other words: supporting front-running HEINEKEN markets with how to use the ‘fuel’ (=data) coming out of the digital touch points to increase customer satisfaction and boost the top line.

The core approach taken in this, is a data-driven learning loop to continuously ideate, test, analyse and scale business improvement ideas that improve digital and non-digital interactions with customers (and consumers). This approach requires an integral cross-functional way of working, which is very different from the (functional) way in which HEINEKEN is currently structured. As such, we agreed on a new organisational model with HEINEKEN’s Executive Team, ‘digital customer businesses’, to be piloted in select front-running HEINEKEN markets. These digital customer businesses effectively operate as start-ups inside the local operating companies, growing customer business while fundamentally shifting towards a digital way of working: iterative test and learn, cross-functional and high velocity.