Digital Technology Assist: exploring the potentialities of augmented reality in Heineken’s global supply chain

Abstract

The development of Industry 4.0 represents a major opportunity for companies like Heineken to affirm themselves as market leaders, establishing a new kind of interaction between man and machine, thanks to the introduction of digital industrial technologies. As part of this transformation, Heineken involved the academic environment creating a series of workstreams with the aim to explore the potentialities of innovative digital solutions in its global supply chain. The thesis analyses the Digital Technology Assist workstream to understand how this kind of innovation can contribute to the productivity and how it affects human workforce. Digital technology assist is a project, organized in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, whose goal is to experiment a new system of assisted preventive maintenance in the brewery located in Aosta. By means of augmented reality glasses, maintenance operators are provided of a step-by-step guidance for the fulfillment of particular tasks allowing them to work more efficiently. A Proof Of Concept has been developed on a specific planned maintenance operation by a team composed of two students, brewery’s technical staff, a global maintenance leader and members from Heineken’s IT department. In order to produce the highest value within a six-month period, the interdisciplinary team decided to manage the project using the Agile approach, which is based on an incremental and iterative way of working.