How Zycus is Helping Heineken to Leverage Agentic AI
When Hervé Le Faou joined Heineken as Chief Procurement Officer in 2017, he encountered a function hampered by decentralisation. With operations across 80 markets, 160 breweries and a portfolio of 350 brands, Heineken's procurement function faced significant challenges in standardisation and efficiency.
During a fireside chat at Zycus’ recent digital event, Unlock Deep Value with Agentic AI in Procurement, Hervé explained: "Contracts were stored manually in SharePoint, operating companies and central teams were having different versions, and it was limiting the performance of our negotiations.
"I was still signing 1,000 contracts a year with pen and ink. The organisation was spending way too much time on arduous tasks impacting the quality of our business and supplier partnerships."
This inefficiency prompted Hervé to pursue a comprehensive digital transformation of Heineken's procurement function, beginning with the implementation of Zycus' source-to-contract suite across 70 markets in 2018. Four years later, Heineken partnered with Zycus to co-develop a purchase-to-pay suite, creating an end-to-end solution that limited interfaces with other systems.
To watch any of the talks from the event on demand, click here.
Delivering tangible results
The implementation of the source-to-contract suite quickly delivered significant improvements.
"After seeing much clearer thanks to Zycus in our spend analytics, the eSourcing and the eAuction modules helped us professionalise and standardise the process of selection of future suppliers as we were going after a consolidated redesign of our supply base," said Hervé.
The results were impressive: after 2000 sourcing events and 1000 e-auctions, Heineken delivered double-digit percentage savings.
The system also provided a single source of truth for contracts, accessible by all teams, leading to high adoption rates on newly negotiated contracts with minimal leakage.
Exploring agentic AI applications
In 2024, Heineken began exploring agentic AI use cases which the business has continued to harness.
Hervé identified six main areas where agentic AI can make a difference in procurement:
- "Let me negotiate that for you": Using negotiation agents to run simple negotiations with non-strategic suppliers, freeing up global category leaders for more strategic work.
- "Let me find that for you": Enabling procurement professionals to ask simple questions to find market or competitive intelligence quickly.
- "Let me explain to you": Summarising lengthy documents to help users understand key points.
- "Let me walk you through": Improving stakeholder compliance with proper challenge management and process flows.
- "Let me design that for you": Replacing lengthy creative processes, such as finding new advertisements for brands.
- "Let me code that for you": Creating system interfaces from common language and data lakes to ease data analytics flows.
Hervé described this progress as "a leapfrog into the future".
Advice for organisations starting their AI journey
For organisations beginning to explore intake management and agentic AI in procurement, Hervé offered pragmatic advice based on Heineken's experience.
"Establish a clear vision and define your objective," he continued. "What are the challenges you see AI being able to address? Set measurable KPIs and the value proposition to track your effectiveness. Be mindful that data is everything, so don't neglect the data foundation and standardisation is king."
He also recommended starting with pilots that prove the value case before scaling up, establishing clear governance and compliance around the ethical use of AI, focusing on change management and user adoption and choosing technology partners carefully.
Agentic AI: Revolutionising the way we work
Hervé believes that agentic AI will fundamentally transform procurement functions.
"We truly believe that agentic AI can revolutionise the way we work and the way we interact with our stakeholders and the way we do business," he said.
With procurement teams set to look "fundamentally different in just three to five years," Hervé concluded with a perspective on the future of the profession: "AI won't take our jobs, but talents using AI will. So let's get ready for the future."
To watch any of the talks from Zycus' virtual event on demand, click here.
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