Driving continuous improvement & a better operator experience

Before a Heineken beer makes it to your table, it’s traveled a long journey through factory machines and hundreds of people who oversee its path from raw ingredients to a perfectly crafted, crisp cold beverage. Heineken operates more than 165 breweries in over 70 countries around the globe, which produce over 188 million hectolitres of beer each year. Maintaining perfect quality at this scale of production is a challenge, and the process doesn’t go without occasional incidents or stoppages. Therefore, Heineken really wanted to drive continuous improvement.

Finding a way to monitor, log, and correct production issues was a top priority for Heineken to reduce costs, increase OEE and improve the worker experience. They wanted a solution that empowered their engineers and operators with a means to access and share information in real-time – and via mobile – to perform their jobs more efficiently.

4Industry, an app built on ServiceNow, was specifically designed for this purpose. Completely customizable to meet each plant’s unique needs, the app allows Heineken operators and engineers to easily manage incidents and changes. Using digital task management to perform and schedule jobs combined with the machine learning engine of ServiceNow to suggest solutions, 4Industry brought both a proactive and predictive approach to maintenance in Heineken’s breweries.

Creating easy access to information to perform jobs

Using the app, workers can access relevant information (OPLs, photos, step-by-step instructions, drawings or designs and Q&A functionality to name a few) needed to perform their job swiftly when working on a change or incident.

Sharing data to drive continuous improvement

Equally important, the app enables workers to log, upload and share information about what they see in the brewery and discover in the process of work, facilitating a fast exchange of information between team members and/or operators and management. This information is crucial for both continuous improvement and training efforts.

Since connectivity in production facilities is often lacking, the app isn’t reliant on a connection to the Now platform, and is designed to function on its own.

Providing data to assess performance and opportunities

Because the platform aggregates data from all app users, it sits on an enormous amount of valuable information that can be used to avoid downtime and cut overhead costs. For example, when a bottling machine runs into an issue, the engineer responsible for that machine is provided with the possible causes and solutions for the incident based on historical data. If this particular incident occurs regularly, root cause analysis is executed within the app so a permanent solution can be designed.

Information collected by 4Industry is displayed in digital dashboards that provide actionable insights so management spends less time filling out spreadsheets, and more time analyzing data to improve operational performance.