Heineken and France Boissons Transform Their Financial Processes
Context
Heineken France operates through two strategic business units: beer brewing (Heineken Entreprise) and beverage distribution (France Boissons). These two businesses were managed independently, despite shared objectives around knowledge sharing and process alignment.
On both sides, the existing tools no longer met market expectations in terms of agility, responsiveness, and the ability to integrate new business parameters such as evolving consumer habits and emerging competitors.
Key figures
Heineken
- France’s leading brewer
- 3 breweries
- 72 distribution sites
- 4,000 employees
France Boissons
- 2,600+ employees
- 50,000+ customers across restaurants, hotels, and key accounts
- 6,500 beverage references
Challenges
The challenge was significant: enabling collective management of financial processes through a single solution capable of covering different business scopes while improving overall performance management efficiency.
Following a competitive tender process, Oracle Cloud EPM was selected in summer 2018. The solution had already been deployed successfully within Heineken Spain, where feedback had been highly positive.
Methods and Solutions
At France Boissons, all simulations were previously carried out in Excel, while the former solution was mainly used for data storage and reporting purposes.
Meanwhile, Heineken’s management control teams wanted to extend access to the platform to a larger number of internal stakeholders and gain better control over business processes. However, their existing infrastructure had become obsolete and impossible to upgrade.
Oracle EPM Cloud successfully addressed the expectations of both organizations.
For Heineken
The solution enabled the company to:
- Cover the entire product portfolio while tracking marketing expenses by brand and market, and integrate marketing teams into the budgeting process
- Monitor Heineken France profit and loss statements (PnL) and feed Group reporting systems
- Manage and analyze commercial activity at product and market level
- Measure the impact of volume, pricing, and brand effects on commercial performance
For France Boissons
The solution enabled the company to:
- Gain advanced simulation capabilities with an extremely granular level of detail, helping reconcile gross profit views (accounting perspective) with net margin analysis (analytical perspective)
- Achieve more precise visibility into the profitability of national accounts through logistics cost allocation
- Improve monitoring of the France Boissons PnL while creating multiple synergies with Heineken
Benefits
Among the most appreciated benefits highlighted by management controllers were the significant gains in calculation and analysis time, particularly for large-scale simulations.
“The automatic daily data loading into the tool also facilitates reporting and improves the productivity of business controllers,” explains Yoann Lecomte.
Another major advantage was the increased level of analytical granularity.
“This finer level of analysis allows us to identify lower-profitability customers and refine our ROI calculations,” adds Emmanuel Borne.
As a result, Heineken is already planning to integrate additional business teams into the solution, starting with its sales teams, and further strengthen interactions with management control departments. At the same time, France Boissons is exploring the implementation of a rolling forecast approach. Both initiatives continue to be carried out in partnership with Talan and powered by Oracle Cloud EPM.
2 years project
across both entities
10 years of support experience
from an experienced project manager
4 consultants
per business scope, depending on project phases
1 brewer of France Boisson
serves more than 50,000 customers
A true collaborative effort
" The success of this project is based on genuine collaboration between all stakeholders: IT teams, business teams, and Talan teams. This allowed us to deliver our 2020 budget in close collaboration with the Marketing teams."
Yoann Lecomte, Management Controller, Heineken