Unilever, one of the world`s leading companies, has embarked on an extensive programme to transform its business. Increased profits and sharply reduced costs form part of this programme, which is being delivered in part by technology.
Unilever makes household favourites such as Knorr, Hellmans, Flora, Lipton, Dove, Lynx, Signal and Lux. It is a company that has developed a strategy to focus R&D and marketing on its leading brands to accelerate growth and ensure it keeps closely in tune with local consumers.
The strategy is termed "Path to Growth", a five-year plan designed to deliver, by 2004, top-line growth of 5% to 6% annually and operating margins of more than 16% by focusing on fewer, stronger brands.
In other words, Unilever will consolidate its 1 600 (in 1999) brands down to some 400, enabling it to support them with strong innovation, increased marketing, a world-class supply chain, simpler business processes and rationalisation of the overall business portfolio. In doing so, the company expects to achieve savings of E1.5 billion (R15 billion) by 2004 from restructuring and simplification and an additional E1.6 billion (R16 billion) by end of 2002 from global procurement.
Across the globe
Unilever is in every sense a multi-local, multinational business that manufactures across the globe. It faces a stern challenge in realising its "Path to Growth" strategy, particularly as it requires product innovation, brand development and supply chain improvement across its portfolio of leading brands.
The programme has created a new demand for accessible, actionable data on a global/regional basis. However, traditionally Unilever has been a decentralised operation and it has had a wide variety of information sources. The harnessing of this mass of data from disparate sources has become an internal brand in itself - with Unilever Information Programme (UIP) a major enabler of the "Path to Growth" strategy.
Information is provided from its seven regional business groups and over 300 operating units. These are supported by numerous IT environments, including various enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications; SAP, MFG Pro, BPCS, Fourth Shift and legacy systems. Although these environments are undergoing large-scale convergence programmes, the scale of data sources is immense. To provide the new information needs to support "Path To Growth", Unilever set out to build an integrated information source to serve thousands of users. Initially, it chose to support four major business thrusts of the 12 listed under Path To Growth:
* Global customers: will help the organisation to better understand and plan with its key customers;
* Brand scan: will monitor the health in non-financial terms of the top 400 power brands and competitors;
* Supply chain: will identify how to improve and streamline supply management worldwide; and
* Finance will provide business intelligence and financial reporting on a global basis.
All the data is extracted from many disparate systems, consolidated into a single data warehouse, which in turn feeds specific, related data to data marts, which are made available to the relevant Unilever communities.
To have an absolute understanding of how to meet the company`s hunger for accurate, accessible business information and to deliver against each business manager`s requirements, Chris Broe, who heads up UIP, and his team developed a super-structure with the data warehouse at its core.
"This data warehouse would have to be fed regularly with relevant information from numerous sources, without impacting the performance of operational systems, integrated, and turned into valuable business intelligence," says Broe. "We also needed to be sure that the solution was durable, scalable, easily maintained and flexible to inevitable changes," he adds.
Having designed the infrastructure to support UIP, Unilever understood that it was looking for a solution to bring every source of data together, one that could populate the data warehouse without restriction and then allow for meaningful data to be made available to end-user data marts. This is no mean feat, since Unilever`s requirement was for an extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool, functionally rich, robust and scalable, that could perform with its multitude of systems.
Proof of concept
For such a programme, Unilever put several ETL tools through their paces in the form of a rigorous proof of concept, and chose Acta Technology`s Data Integration Platform. This was mandated across the globe and underpinned with an attractive financial proposition.
"We chose Acta for its ability to extract data and transform it into usable business information and load it to the data warehouse," says Broe.
Acta`s solution is one of the fastest ways to achieve data integration based on its rapid installation. The Data Integration Platform comprises a suite of products, at the heart of which is the ActaWorks data server, which can access multiple sources and intelligently manage and optimise the performance of an enterprise`s data infrastructure.
This is complemented by the Acta eCaches, pre-packaged batch and real-time data movement and business logic for analytics and other data-intensive integration projects such as CRM and supply chain management.
"It`s early days for ActaWorks, but so far we`ve been able to do so much more with it than we anticipated," says Steve Applegate, integration manager at Unilever. "It has enabled us to realise our objectives for the UIP and more, since we are now looking to replicate what we have done to consolidate data for the UIP to help the regions realise their own transparency via the deployment of a similar architecture."
There are five regions which Applegate anticipates will deploy their own data integration project, all of which will be looking to consolidate data using ActaWorks as an integration platform.
"Brazil has taken the UIP model and implemented a data warehouse that has linked some 130 operational companies to benefit from a single source of information. Again, ActaWorks has been the glue that has enabled them to populate a single data warehouse," adds Applegate.
IT continues to play a significant role as Unilever moves down its path to growth. "Acta has proven to be indestructible. A project is always on the line when you introduce a new technology. Fortunately, Acta has transformed what we were doing and how we were doing it," concludes Applegate.
Acta Technology solutions are distributed solely in South Africa by GBI, the business intelligence division of JSE Securities Exchange-listed Global Technology.
Share
Editorial contacts