Unilever Drives Efficiency by Digitizing their Supply Chain

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The global CPG giant streamlines their excess inventory and SLOB sales process

Company Profile

Unilever is a multinational company that sells fast-moving consumer goods. Their product verticals include food, health, personal care, and home care with 2.5 billion people using their products daily. The company operates in 190 countries with 149,000 employees and over $61 billion in annual revenue. 

Challenge

Inventory was being produced faster than it could be sold, resulting in rapid growth of slow-moving & obsolete inventory YoY. 

The build-up of slow-moving and excess inventory resulted from:

• Double-selling due to a lack of real-time visibility into available inventory and sales activity causes confusion and frustration in the selling organization
• Manual, error-prone, and inconsistent processes
• Lengthy sales cycles across multiple channels
• Lack of historical insights and data to drive strategic decisions

Solution

Unilever partnered with INTURN to streamline processes in their sales cycle while digitizing their supply chain. 

• Centralized System: With the ability to access the INTURN tool in the office or remotely, thirty internal stakeholders and three different channel teams leveraged the platform to make informed inventory decisions and account for real-time & historical sales activity.
• Platform Based: Transitioning from spreadsheets to a real-time platform with accurate product information and images removed manual errors and created a cohesive, automated process across teams.
• Streamlined Negotiation: Unilever has created a total of 272 transactions for their buyers with the INTURN tool. By providing more critical information and product images upfront, Unilever successfully executed more efficient negotiations and decreased their overall transaction time.
• Data-Driven Decision-making: By planning and transacting within the INTURN tool, Unilever has accumulated historical data to pivot at an opportunity. The platform hosts prior sales data allowing platform users to draw insights into customer buying behavior and maximize turnaround.

“We are working with the INTURN tool to sign deals directly in the platform and manage sales, not just inventory. We want to make the user experience better, with data mor readily available so we can pivot at an opportunity. Unilever also wants to measure the positive impact of selling slow-moving inventory on the environment by avoiding food waste, the landfilling of plastics, and the destruction of products.” 

– Head of Channel & Customer Development

Results

“What used to take one week-plus is taking significantly less time … We have decreased the time the average offer is out there by one-third”

– Head of Channel & Customer Development 

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