Heineken harnesses Ultimaker S5 3D printing system to produce custom tool and functional machine parts

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Heineken has harnessed Ultimaker’s S5 3D printing platform to produce custom tools and functional machine parts in its brewery in Seville.

The company is designing and printing safety devices, tools and on-demand parts, increasing productivity and reducing production costs by 80%. Typically, these parts would be outsourced.

In Seville, the brewery produces 500 million litres of several Heineken-owned beers every year. The engineers at this base have been using 3D printing for around 12 months, starting with an Ultimaker 2+ and moving to multiple S5 machines. At first, the technology was used for safety applications, but now Ultimaker’s machines are also being implemented for functional spare parts for in-house machinery and tools for quality control and maintenance.

“We’re still in the first stages of 3D printing, but we’ve already seen a reduction of costs in the applications that we found by 70-90% and also a decrease of delivery time of these applications of 70-90%,” commented Isabelle Haenen, Global Supply Chain Procurement at Heineken. “Local manufacturing helps us a lot in increasing uptime, efficiency and output. We use 3D printing to optimise the manufacturing line, create safety and quality control tools, and create tools for our machines which that help us to reduce change over time. I think there will be even more purposes in the future.”

“Every company has its own unique challenges in the production process, which is why the ability to create custom solutions straight from the factory floor is such a game-changer for the manufacturing industry,” added Jos Burger, CEO, Ultimaker. “Heineken is a prime example of a company that’s utilising the Ultimaker S5 as an all-purpose manufacturing machine. We have enjoyed watching the use case evolve over the past year, from safety applications to the creation of fully functional parts for machines that lead to significant savings, and we cannot wait to see what they come up with next.”