How HEINEKEN is scaling app and agentic development with OutSystems
HEINEKEN, one of the most iconic beer brands, is driving a company-wide strategy called EverGreen to become the world’s pioneering beer company. With big development needs and even bigger goals, HEINEKEN rolled out a federated development model with a dedicated team on OutSystems development. Local teams build fast; central IT governs everything. The result is a growing portfolio of secure, compliant applications and AI agents deployed across 80+ operating companies worldwide, including a “Truck Sequencing” app that has eliminated safety incidents, improved transparency, and returned thousands of hours every year.
7,280 hours
100%
15 million
Bringing back 15 million hours to the business
Back in 2020, HEINEKEN, the iconic Dutch brewer, rolled out a company-wide strategy to make its business more resilient and adaptable: the EverGreen 2030. Centered around customer centricity, productivity, and urgent business digitization, the strategy aims to make HEINEKEN the world’s pioneering beer company.
“We have several goals as part of the EverGreen strategy,” said Giada Binelli, Global Hyperautomation Tribe Lead. “For the hyperautomation team, our focus is to give back 15 million hours to the business by 2030 through automation.” The team is well on its way to achieve this by identifying and optimizing manual and repetitive processes across HEINEKEN’s 80+ operating companies (OpCos) worldwide.
But this ambitious goal required Giada’s team to scale its development capabilities without massively growing the workforce. The answer was a federated development model.
"What makes OutSystems an asset for our federated development model is that it is not limited to just 1% of use cases; we can build anything we want."
How OutSystems supports HEINEKEN’s federated development model to deliver value around the world
The hyperautomation team brought in several technologies to support the federated model, including document processing, automation tools, conversational and generative AI, low-code, and agentic systems engineering platforms like OutSystems. The small, but highly specialized team manages all these technologies, establishes global security protocols and architectural standards, and curates a shared repository of reusable components.
Then, decentralized federated teams use these assets to autonomously build the solutions they need as securely and efficiently as possible, always under the oversight of the central team.
“With OutSystems, we can establish role-based access control, manage automated CI/CD pipelines, and continuously monitor infrastructure stability across all OpCos,” said Praveen Kumar Natarajan, OutSystems Architect at HEINEKEN. “By following OutSystems architecture guidelines, we can also isolate core data layers and expose them as needed through APIs and pre-approved Forge components in a shared repository.” The result is a fully connected development ecosystem where every application built on OutSystems is mapped to HEINEKEN’s context graph.
This setup allows federated units to rapidly drag and drop global components into their local workflows with absolute peace of mind, knowing that structural security, data compliance, and technical debt guardrails are automatically baked into the platform.
"My number one takeaway is flexibility. OutSystems enables us to deliver applications exactly how the business wants them, with the right user experience and the right features, every time. We recently had a requirement initially slated for a ticketing tool, but the ability of OutSystems to build custom workflows and features tailored precisely to what the business needs made it a better fit."
Solving a critical safety challenge in Nigeria with OutSystems
One of the thousands of optimization opportunities identified across HEINEKEN’s global operations came from Nigeria, where local breweries struggled with a critical inefficiency in truck operations. “Trucks transporting returnable packaging materials arrive in no particular order, but that arrival sequence should determine exactly when they’re dispatched back out,” explained Fortunate Eze, Digital Product Manager at the Nigerian OpCo.
The problem was that the process was entirely manual. Security guards tracked arrival orders on paper, leaving logistics managers with zero visibility into the tarmac. “Drivers could call the guard while still on their way to move their name up the list. This lack of transparency created serious friction between drivers, raising safety concerns,” shared Fortunate. A tragic dispute between drivers made digitizing the queueing system an immediate priority.
So, working with central IT, Fortunate and team built a tailored solution on OutSystems.
"We chose OutSystems for several reasons: development speed, the flexibility to add custom code when needed, and the ability to build an external-facing interface so that truck drivers and logistics partners could securely interact with it. Unlike other tools in our stack, OutSystems had no external access limitations and that was very important."
Bringing order, transparency, and safety to the tarmac
With the new “Truck Sequencing” application, every truck is assigned a QR code on arrival that security guards scan via tablet into a live first in, first out (FIFO) queue. A real-time yard map gives logistics coordinators full visibility over truck locations, arrival times, and parking stalls that are updated instantly via an API connector that tracks gate swipes.
From there, the system guides the entire process: drivers park in designated slots, hand over their keys to a banksman, and wait in a designated room until their truck is called via an automated audio announcement generated by a custom synthetic voice system built directly into the app.
“95% of this app was built natively on OutSystems,” shared Fortunate. “The only component that isn’t in OutSystems is the book gates system for the trucks to pass. For that, we built an API to bridge the gates and the app.” This way, when a driver drops the card into the collector to exit the tarmac, it physically opens the boom gate and simultaneously sends a real-time signal back to OutSystems to automatically free up the parking slot that the truck just left.
"The central IT team set up the core environment, created the foundational modules, and reviewed the app as we built it. We owned the business logic, while they maintained governance throughout."
Zero safety incidents and thousands of hours saved
The “Truck Sequencing” application has been rolled out to three breweries with plans to expand it to all seven locations in Nigeria. The company is also discussing a potential rollout in Ethiopia.
The new system reduced manual tracking efforts by 50%, saving approximately 7,280 hours per year and one full-time equivalent (FTE) per brewery, a meaningful step toward HEINEKEN’s goal of 15 million hours returned to the business by 2030. But the most important metric is the number of reported safety incidents: “I’m incredibly happy to share that we had zero reported incidents since the deployment of the app. It completely fulfilled our primary safety metric,” added Fortunate.
The truck sequencing app is just one of many solutions HEINEKEN has built with OutSystems that reflect the company’s commitment to safety, human rights, and employee wellbeing.
This includes “Brand Promoters”, a global app that is used by more than 11,000 field representatives at events like the UEFA Champions League and Formula 1 races. To represent HEINEKEN at any event, brand promoters must complete a mandatory safety and compliance certification through this app.
“The goal of ‘Brand Promoters’ is to increase the physical safety of our brand promoters worldwide and provide total operational transparency over HEINEKEN’s promotional activities,” said Jakub Strojek, Business Analyst at HEINEKEN’s OutSystems Delivery team.
"Every time I share a difficult requirement with our developers, the answer is always the same: everything is possible with OutSystems. The integrations, the flexibility, the speed of delivery, it’s what allows us to keep up with what the business demands."
Agentic Systems Engineering for governance and app generation
HEINEKEN is now taking its use of OutSystems further with agentic systems engineering, the next frontier of AI-augmented software development.
Central IT has already deployed HEINEKEN’s first AI agents on OutSystems. One integrates with the “Ideation App”, also built on the platform, where employees can submit requests, ideas, and issues they run into during their daily work.
“The agent guides employees through the submission process, engaging in a dynamic dialogue to extract the context needed to properly scope and triage each request. It helps us ensure that every incoming idea is governed and documented as the company scales,” said Katarzyna Lasoń, Global Product Owner for OutSystems at HEINEKEN.
A second agent supports the DevOps team in validating technical debt during deployment reviews, helping them decide whether to approve or reject incoming deployment requests and ensuring code quality is maintained as the portfolio grows.
In its quest to automate 15 million hours, HEINEKEN is now using OutSystems Mentor to accelerate development cycles and maintain high code quality. “We uploaded the exact business requirements for an app to Mentor, and it generated 80% of the app, from the data model and server-side logic to the essential screens,” shared Praveen. “Within minutes, we had the base foundation ready, enabling the delivery team to focus on innovation and refinements faster.”
For HEINEKEN, this is just the beginning. Every app built makes the next one faster, and every hour saved brings the 2030 target closer.
"You invest so much time in developing a solution. With tools like OutSystems, you can reuse that app. So every new app we deliver is an investment for future development."
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