Unilever's Global Effort to Become More Demand Driven

With 400 brands spanning 14 categories of home, personal care and food products, Unilever is one of the world's largest consumer products goods companies. While major consumer packaged goods companies tend to focus on either food or personal care, Unilever has large operations in both areas, which create different supply chain challenges.

 

Recent volatility has placed a premium on understanding consumer preferences, and Unilever recognized that more accurate demand signals can positively impact customer service, drive down inventory levels and reduce costs.

 

In a recent and highly attended CGT web seminar, titled "Demand Sensing and Inventory optimization Go Global at Unilever", Doug Sloan, Unilever North America's director of Supply Chain Operations, explained why the consumer goods giant implemented Terra Technology's Demand Sensing as part of their journey to become more demand-driven.

 

"The availability of downstream data, particularly point of sale, has really enabled demand sensing for more companies over the last few years. Some companies have implemented full blown Demand Signal Repositories to centrally manage this data so other departments and processes can leverage it. But in other cases, supply chain management applications that sense and manage demand will be fed this data directly. The results of these initiatives have been quite impressive, as you will hear in a minute," said Kara Romanow, executive editor, CGT, in her opening comments.

 

Case in point: The successful U.S. implementation has reduced Unilever's forecast error, improved inventory planning, decreased expediting costs and reduced safety stocks. Based on these results, Unilever is implementing Demand Sensing as well as Terra's Multi-Enterprise Inventory Optimization solution globally.

 

âââ¬ÅâThe need to improve the forecast is not unique to North America by any means. What we found is that we've all been struggling with the same challenge of how to improve your forecast across all markets. Clearly, each markets has different challenges with different customer bases. The beauty that we found with the demand sensing application is that it bolts on to the back of any existing processes and tools that you have. In the pilots that we did across a couple of different markets, we found similar results,âââ¬ï¿½ said Sloan.

 

Sloan was joined by Terra Technology CEO Robert F. Byrne, who helped pioneer the company's first demand sensing solution using better mathematics and downstream data to improve supply chain performance.

 

To listen to this web seminar on demand, click here.