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 on a daily basis. 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 lack of real-time visibility into available inventory and sales activity causing 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 INTURN 360 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 processes across teams.
- Streamlined Negotiation: Unilever has created a total of 272 transactions for their buyers with INTURN 360. 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 INTURN 360, Unilever has accumulated historical data in order to pivot at an opportunity. The platform hosts prior sales data allowing platform users to draw insights on customer buying behavior and maximize turnaround.
“We are working with INTURN to sign deals directly in the platform and manage sales, not just inventory. We want to make the user experience better, with data more 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
Implementing these solutions led to tangible gains in their sales process:
Looking to digitize your supply chain to drive business process improvements and efficiencies? We can help. Discover INTURN 360 here.