Unilever

ChallengeUnilever 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 Ђ 1.6 billion from global procurement efficiencies and management expects to save an additional Ђ 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.

ApproachTo 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