Scope
Heineken's B2B ordering was fragmented per operating company. One country still received orders by fax. Others ran homegrown systems. France required competitor products to be presented alongside Heineken's own brands, a regulatory constraint that shaped the whole architecture. The UK carried its own VAT and legal frame.
The mandate: a single SAP Hybris core platform with country-specific layers absorbing local rules. PAN-EU in scope, sequenced UK first, then France, Switzerland and the rest.
Before, fragmented per operating company
After, one core with country layers
How it ran
It started at the pitch: a working prototype built from a colleague's earlier discovery, pitched, and won for IBM iX. From there the PAN-EU shop template ran through fortnightly three-day workshops rotating Amsterdam, Paris and London, aligning the French, UK and Dutch operating companies to one shared core, before settling permanently in London.
IBM iX delivery side
Heineken client side
Between workshops the design was solo work: aligning each operating company's preferences against the shared template, translating outcomes into the next round of artifacts, holding conceptual integrity under continuous market-specific pressure. I also set up the design stream within the programme, interviewing and onboarding the designers who staffed it.
The hardest call
A hard release window was set by an unrelated license expiring on Heineken's side. Some of the more elegant approaches we'd developed weren't feasible inside that window. The decision was to ship the smaller, cleaner version that met the constraint and defer the rest to phase two.
Judgement call, taken under pressure: "shipped on time" beats "shipped a better idea late" when the deadline carries hard commercial cost. The cost of running over wasn't a slipped milestone, it was an expiring license. We held the scope, deferred ambition, and UK launched on schedule.
Wouldn't fit the window
The hard constraint
What landed cleanly
Alignment
Three operating companies, continuous per-market pressure against the shared template, one round of escalation through programme leadership when a market's preferences ran counter to validated shared patterns. The agreed scope held. The template stayed shared. The market launched on the platform we'd defined.
Impact
- UK launched on time under the license-driven deadline. The platform went live with the agreed scope.
- The team was awarded the IBM Benelux Excellence Award in Amsterdam for the largest Hybris-based PAN-EU B2B shop within IBM iX at the time.
- Set up the design stream within the programme, interviewing and onboarding the designers who staffed it.
Reflection
Phased rollout is a feature, not a compromise. A PAN-EU platform doesn't ship to all markets at once. UK first, the rest sequenced behind, was the discipline that let the platform actually launch.
Hard deadlines clarify scope better than discovery does. The license expiration forced choices the team had been deferring for months. Not all of them were what we'd have chosen under no pressure. They were the right choices for shipping.