Heineken processes documents from 25.000 customers in record time due to outsourcing
In 45 days, Star Storage accomplishes the inventory for 25.000 Heineken customers. The entire process is unique on the Romanian market, as it contains complex printing and document conversion processes with a 100% accuracy guarantee. This project has allowed Heineken to successfully realize an audit process in a very short time. Without the processes outsourcing to a specialized company, this wouldn’t have been possible.
About HEINEKEN ROMANIA
Part of the international Heineken Group, Heineken Romania was founded in 1998, initially under the name of Brau Union Romania. Starting March 2007, the company took the name of Heineken Romania. This change meant also adopting the Heineken culture and values, a group that has more than 170 beer and other beverage brands. Heineken Romania portfolio covers all the segments of the local market: Heineken, Ciuc Premium, Golden Brau, Neumarkt, Bucegi, Gosser, Schlossgold, Silva, Gambrinus, Harghita, Hategana, Zipfer and Edelweiss. The company has 4 breweries throughout the country and approximately 1300 employees, dedicated people that work either in the mentioned breweries or at the distribution offices of the company.
Initial situation
Ever since entering the Romanian market, Heineken Romania's focus was on developing a partner stores network for distributing their products countrywide. These stores were landed fixed assets (plastic tables and chairs, beer barrels, umbrellas, window refrigerators).
The company annually audits these assets in different locations around the country. In order to be able to realize the audit in the second semester of 2009, the company needed the confirmation of these fixed assets existence, Heineken Romania's property, landed to its partners.
Challenges and problems
If they had chosen an inventory solution for this audit, the company would have needed over 500 employees on the field, all equipped with state of the art bar code scanning machines, internet connection and an inventory solution that could keep track of the fixed assets' evolution. However, the implementing costs of such an inventory process would have been too high. Moreover, the timeframe for this process scenario would have been extended to more than the end of the year, overpassing the time limit for the audit.
"In order to be able to manage this audit, the most important aspect for us was raising and centralizing all pieces of information is a very limited period of time. The second condition was the implementation's quality. Star Storage's proposed solution was excellent from this perspective. Over 25.000 envelopes were created, containing printed and enveloped documents with the data for every single customer - equipment list of their own assets, checking instructions and an automated response envelope. The entire process took 4 hours from the moment when we sent the information, including the projecting of the inventory forms phase, so that they can be easily filled in and that the data extraction can be automatically realized with the help of the unique specialized data capture soft developed by Star Storage. It is amazing to see the evolution of the technology in this field. The information was 100% accurate."
Star Storage solution
Star Storage is the only company in Romania that is specialized in document management outsourcing, along the entire document lifecycle, from production to printing and enveloping and from scanning processing, optical character recognition/barcodes recognition, to data extracting from forms etc. The company uses state of the art technology, methodology and expertise needed in order to implement the most advanced document digitization techniques.
"The solution offered to us by Star Storage has gained our trust, mostly due to the incredibly good balance between the effective cost, time and speed of the processes and the quality of the outcome - the processed data. The automation of the entire workflow accelerated the processing time and eliminated the manual steps, offering a 360 degrees perspective over the information. The company invested a lot in state of the art hardware and software technologies, in order to make the most of the advantages that digitization offers. Their over 10 years experience in the field, along with the processes they were involved in during all this time, offered us the certainty that we made the best choice".
Multiple benefits
The entire project brought different types of benefits for Heineken - the benefits resulted from the outsourced activity itself, but also the specific benefits, as the complexity of the project makes it the only one of its kind on the local market:
- Operational costs reduction and efficiency increase;
- Audit process time reduction;
- Errors elimination for the manually inserted data;
- Compliance with the legal requirements;
- Critical business documents availability;
- New business perspectives, like using distributed processes and distributed workforce;
- Structured data and unstructured data, by connecting transaction recordings to associated documentation;
- Coordination of all equipment functions from a single point, thus facilitating the follow-up and efficient control of all ongoing processes;
- Eliminate errors by limiting human interventions and using business processes automation;
- Transparent resource management.