Putting Unilever’s Metadata In One Big Basket

The Scale of the Data

Unilever is one of the world’s largest FMCG businesses, owning more than 400 famous brands that are sold across the world. Unilever US drives the greatest proportion of revenues, which amounted to a global turnover of €52Bn in 2019. Given the scale and complexity of their operations and metadata, Unilever had identified a need to better understand their Cost-to-Serve, which was when they called us in.

“With the help of CadDo team and their user-friendly platform, we have a deeper understanding of how customer behaviour and different route-to-market decisions drive our performance, which in turn helps us better define customer segments and come up with targeted strategies.” Lilian Riniere Senior Manager

Our Understanding

We began the project with a series of scoping and design workshops, in order to understand and document all of the requirements. One of the key insights to emerge was that some of Unilever’s legacy systems were difficult to use. For example: the client’s existing software to track different types of customer/promotional investment was complicated and difficult for users to easily interpret, which is a considerable problem for such a key metric.

Our Approach

The scope of our solution encompassed capturing all components from Gross Sales down to Operating Income, enabling a true and holistic view of customer and product profitability as well as a granular view of Logistics and Supply Chain performance.

Measures of Success

CadDo is now live in Unilever’s largest markets (notably US and Brazil making up 20% of the global business), with more than 150 super-users. These include Supply Chain and Customer Service super-users, as well as a large contingent within Sales and Customer Development roles.

Supply Chain Success: The granularity of the output data enables Supply Chain users to easily analyse line items and the true cost of individual activities on the ground. CadDo has also helped to overcome the issue of complexity within the shipment & warehouse management software, as this is now displayed in an easily understood format in online tablet-friendly reports.
Sales Success: In addition to informing strategic decision-making by Customer Development teams, CadDo’s Dashboards provide a user-friendly way for the field sales teams (of around 500 people) to get a holistic view of their customer investments and manage their Operating Margin by customer and category over time. This enables them to understand the drivers of revenues and costs, and to benchmark customers. These drivers and benchmarks are used for internal decision- making, but also give the field teams confidence, serving as a conversation starter to help identify opportunities as they work with customer teams to create win-win solutions.

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