Royal Swinkels
International family business pursues digital leadership with full SAP CX stack
300-year-old family business with a digital thirst
Royal Swinkels, a family business with more than 300 years of brewing history, faced a strategic challenge. As a globally operating brewer with a growing international position, they understand the importance of future-proof infrastructure. Business customers increasingly expect a digital experience similar to B2C platforms: 24/7 availability, real-time insight and self-service capabilities.
Shortly before, Royal Swinkels completed their large-scale migration to SAP S/4HANA. A B2B customer portal for the Dutch market already existed as well. The new platform—for which Elision handled the implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP CDP, SAP CDC and SAP Emarsys—had to integrate seamlessly with existing systems. Scalability was a crucial requirement: the platform needed to grow with new markets, functionalities and technologies.
A pragmatic approach with an eye for adoption
The complexity of this challenge requires more than technical implementation alone; this digital transformation needs a pragmatic approach. That's where Elision came in. Together with Royal Swinkels, they started developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to ensure technical excellence and evolve the platform based on concrete user experiences.
This approach also placed the human side of the transformation at center stage—a crucial wish from Royal Swinkels. After all, the platform needs to work well technically, but must also be embraced organization-wide. One example: being able to see how full a container is for a specific order. For the customer, this means a more cost-efficient order. For Swinkels, it means efficiency gains in optimal container delivery and fewer contact moments.
This business-first approach was translated into three concrete pillars:
- Focus on business adoption from day one
- Regular demos to stakeholders for direct feedback
- A scalable foundation for future rollout
Six months to make the difference
Meanwhile, international competition in the beer market wasn't slowing down. To improve the customer experience of the ordering process and automate manual, error-prone work, Royal Swinkels faced a tight but crucial deadline: the new platform had to go live within 6 months. The Export unit, where manual processes were most time-consuming and the digital gap most apparent, was chosen as the starting point. By focusing on this unit as an MVP first, practical insights could be applied directly to subsequent Business Units. The key: a composable architecture with components that can easily be switched on or off per market. No full rebuild per Business Unit, but targeted configuration based on what's already proven to work.
To meet this ambitious deadline, Elision developed a tightly phased approach. Weekly demos to the customer support team ensured no valuable time was lost on functionalities that wouldn't work in practice. This intensive collaboration proved valuable: feedback was processed immediately, problems were identified and solved early, and support for the new platform grew by the day. The result was a platform that not only went live on time, but also aligned directly with users' daily practice.
The result
The impact of the new platform became visible quickly:
- 75% increased productivity in order processing
- Ability to place complete container orders in less than 45 seconds
- 50% of Export customers using the platform within one year
Digital-first platform, built on eight generations of brewing expertise
The successful implementation of the B2B platform for the Export unit was just the beginning of a larger transformation. Thanks to the composable infrastructure as a scalable foundation, Royal Swinkels can now unlock a new market every 10 weeks - a pace that was previously unthinkable.
The pragmatic collaboration between Elision and Royal Swinkels proved crucial in this. With focus on business value and strong stakeholder involvement, a platform was created that works technically and is widely embraced. Future developments focus on personalization, predictive analytics and supply chain automation. This is how Royal Swinkels combines the best of both worlds: eight generations of brewing expertise, strengthened with the latest digital capabilities.
The beer market is digitalizing rapidly. With this B2B platform, we're not just laying the foundation for more efficient order processing, but building a digital infrastructure that supports our international growth ambitions.
Paul van Brussel
Global Sales Operations Manager & E2E Lead Lead-to-Order - Royal Swinkels
Royal Swinkels' partnership with Elision has been rewarded with a Dutch Interactive Award!
In 2025, Royal Swinkels' collaboration with Elision and Jungle Minds was recognized with a Golden Dutch Interactive Award (DIA). The award acknowledges the joint digital transformation that adds value at both strategic and user level.
The jury praised the project with the words: "Strategy, concept and design are well thought through. Real intelligence has been added." This recognition underlines the power of digital innovation when deployed with concrete business objectives in mind.
The Dutch Interactive Awards, organized by Emerce, annually recognize the most leading digital projects in the Netherlands. We congratulate all other winners and nominees on their achievements—together we continue to raise the digital bar.