Heineken
Assembly Line
Technical tour to Europe’s largest solar industrial heat plant at Heineken Spain
The HEINEKEN Company in Spain has officially launched the largest industrial solar thermal plant in the world using ‘Fresnel’ technology, at its brewery site in Valencia. The park is composed of highly reflective mirrors that use sunlight to heat water, following the sun’s path. All light is concentrated onto a tube that heats the water in the circuit up to an exceptional 220 degrees Celsius, generating the necessary steam for making beer. With this solar thermal plant, almost half of the energy used to produce beer in Valencia will be renewable - a crucial step towards having all four of our breweries in Spain run on 100% renewable energy.
Heineken’s Event-Driven Connectivity Strategy
To understand the scope of this connectivity project, it’s important to realize that Heineken runs more than 3,500 applications globally, connecting them with more than 5,000 interfaces. ERP systems in use across the company include SAP, Oracle’s JD Edwards, and Microsoft Dynamics, as well as the Hybris and Virto e-commerce platforms, Salesforce customer relationship management, and various manufacturing execution and invoicing systems.
Groeneweg adds that, with its new event-driven system in place, Heineken can now deploy scalable “plug-and-play” technologies quickly to take advantage of timely business insights at scale. To explain this, Groeneweg offers an example involving the introduction of a new global invoice management application. Before the implementation of Heineken’s event-driven system, multiple point-to-point integrations would need to be built to embed the new application into the company’s IT landscape. “We would have to connect it to at least 20 applications to get master data, ERP data, customer data, etc.,” says Groeneweg. “With the event-driven approach, we just point the chatbot to the right topics and queues where the data is already available from all the source systems it needs to access. No integration work is required at all.”