Unilever
Uses Data Integrator to Jumpstart Growth Strategy, Increase Revenues
“We evaluated the ETL marketplace and chose BusinessObjects Data Integrator for its ability to extract data, transform it into usable business information, and load it into the data warehouse.”
Chris Broe, Unilever Information Program Director at Unilever.
Challenge
Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of consumer goods, including household favorites such as Persil, Knorr, Hellmann’s, Lipton, and Dove. To keep up with consumer needs and increase operating margins, Unilever wanted to consolidate its 1600 brands to 400 by 2004. By consolidating its brands, Unilever plans to focus on stronger product innovations, strengthening marketing efforts, building a world-class supply chain, and simplifying business processes. Dubbed Unilever’s Path to Growth strategy, the company has already saved € 1.6 billion from global procurement efficiencies and management expects to save an additional € 1.5 billion by 2004 from restructuring and simplifying processes.
Maintaining 1,600 brands among seven regional business groups and over 300 operating units created a heavy burden on Unilever’s IT environment. Unilever had a decentralized IT infrastructure with multiple environments, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications from companies such as SAP, MFG Pro, BPCS, and Fourth Shift, as well as legacy systems. To reach its Path to Growth goals, employees at Unilever needed fast, easy access to actionable information on both a regional and global basis. To get to this point, the IT department launched the Unilever Information Program (UIP) to develop an infrastructure to support the Path to Growth strategy. One of the greatest priorities on the UIP agenda was to find a quick data integration solution to allow user access to any number of data sources for in-depth analysis.
Approach
To support the new Path to Growth information needs, Unilever set out to build an integrated information source to serve thousands of users around the world. Initially, the UIP chose four major business units to:
- Better understand consumer needs and plan with its key global customers
- Monitor the health of its top 400 power brands and competitors
- Identify how to improve and streamline supply chain management worldwide
- Provide business intelligence (BI) and financial reporting on a global basis
Unilever needed to extract data from a multitude of disparate systems from around the world, consolidate it into a single data warehouse, feed it into specific data marts, and then make the data available to relevant end users.
After deciding who needed what information and when, the question remained: Where to start? Chris Broe, director of the UIP, and his team began by developing a super-structure with a corporate data warehouse at its very core. "This data warehouse would have to be regularly fed with relevant information from numerous sources, without impacting the performance of the operational systems, integrated, and turned into valuable business intelligence," said Chris. "We also needed to be sure that the solution was durable, scalable, easily maintained, and flexible to changes that will occur over time."
Having designed the infrastructure to support the UIP, Unilever understood that it was looking for a solution to bring every source of data together, populate the data warehouse without restriction, and then allow end-user access to meaningful data. To do this, Unilever evaluated several extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tools through a rigorous proof-of-concept, and selected BusinessObjects™ Data Integrator. "We evaluated the ETL marketplace and chose Data Integrator for its ability to extract data, transform it into usable business information, and load it into the data warehouse," said Chris.
Business Objects data integration products are designed for quick installations to give organizations a jumpstart on all of their data integration projects. Data Integrator has a data server that can access multiple sources and will intelligently manage and optimize the performance of Unilever’s data infrastructure. Unilever is also using BusinessObjects Rapid Marts™, which provide prepackaged batch and real-time data movement and business logic for analytics and other data-intensive integration projects such as customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) applications.
Results
"We’ve been able to do so much more with Data Integrator than we first anticipated," said Steve Applegate, integration manager at Unilever. "It has enabled us to realize our objectives for the UIP and more, since we are now looking at replicating what we have done to help the other regions make information more accessible for end users via the deployment of a similar architecture."
There are five regions currently working on data integration projects that Steve expects will consolidate their data using Data Integrator as an integration platform. "Brazil has taken the UIP model and has implemented a data warehouse project that has linked some 130 operational companies to benefit from a single source of information," noted Steve. "Again, Data Integrator has been the glue that has enabled this geography to populate a single data warehouse."
With Data Integrator, IT continues to play a significant role as Unilever moves down its Path to Growth. "So far, Data Integrator has proved to be indestructible. Data Integrator has transformed what we were doing and how we were doing it," concluded Steve.
Quick Facts
Industry
Leading supplier of consumer packaged goods.
Business Pain
Essential to Unilever’s aggressive growth strategy was a centralized IT infrastructure across its seven regional groups and 300-plus operating units to make corporate data quickly accessible for end users.
Why Business Objects?
Business Objects data integration products allowed Unilever to quickly integrate its numerous data sources to continue its growth strategy to consolidate brands, simplify processes, streamline supply chains, and increase revenues.
For More Info
Visit Unilever website www.unilever.com