This article appeared in the JUL AUG SEP 2013 issue

of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com)
and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.

Unilever
Goes Global
in Its SAP HANA Journey
In-Memory Analytics Spur Complete Business Transformation
by Ken Murphy, Senior Writer

W
hen consumer goods giant
Unilever announced plans to
double its business by 2020,
it had to think on a global
scale. There was no alternative for a company
with 2 billion consumers using at least one
Unilever product each day, including some
of the world’s most recognizable brands like
Dove, Axe/Lynx, Lux/Radox, Becel/Flora,
Knorr, Lipton, Hellmann’s, Heartbrand, and
Ben & Jerry’s.
In projecting to reach 4 billion of the earth’s
(by-then) 9 billion inhabitants each day to ful-
fill its 10-year plan, as well as double sales to
€80 billion, Unilever will need to do more than
simply put additional products on the shelves.
Finding a revenue stream by expanding into
emerging markets is a central component of
the ambitious roadmap, which also includes
halving its environmental impact within the
same timeframe.
Enabling Growth with Convergence
Unilever’s business model prior to 2007, when
mostly every business in nearly 200 countries
of operation acted as an autonomous subsid-
iary, would have made this ambitious growth
plan exceedingly difficult. Under this model,
Unilever operated more than 250 ERP instanc-
es, processing roughly 30,000 transactions per
minute. One key step, then, toward a growth-
oriented business focus would entail consoli-
dating its fragmented IT and ERP platform to
be managed as a single global entity.
“Our worldwide business runs on ERP
systems. Every transaction for each order we

Subscribe today. Visit insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com.

 At a Glance
Objective: Converge more than 250 ERP
systems into four regional-based SAP ERP
systems managed as one global platform, and
maximize efficiency of core financial processes
and reporting
Solution: In parallel with the move to a
global platform, implemented core SAP ERP
Financials and other applications on
SAP HANA
Benefits: Significantly reduced time spent on
month-end financial close process, financial
analysis, and product cost forecasting process
receive, material we produce, item we ship, and invoice we
issue runs through our backbone ERP systems,” says Marc
Béchet, Unilever’s Global ERP Vice President. “Trying to
run a global business that was doubling its transaction vol-
ume with 250 systems would have been quite challenging.”
Instead of adding layers of IT infrastructure to prepare
for rapid business growth, Unilever’s globalization strategy
involved the exact opposite action. The business knew that
convergence was necessary to respond to worldwide market
forces in a truly global supply chain. According to Béchet,
Unilever is nearing completion of a project to run its world-
wide business on four landscapes of SAP ERP, with the
ultimate goal of managing these landscapes as one global
platform by 2015.
This project has already paid substantial dividends. In
addition to a three-year revenue growth of €10 billion — a
quarter of the way toward its goal — Gartner recently recog-
nized Unilever as #4 on its Supply Chain Top 25 2013 listing,
reflecting a combination of top supply chain leadership and
performance.1 Unilever was ranked #10 in 2012.2
Rapid Expansion, Rapid Analysis
To remain “at the forefront of the supply chain maturity
curve with a wide range of cutting-edge practices,” to bor-
row Gartner’s analysis, Unilever knows that with its new
IT solutions, speed will be a key component of its ability to
1
Gartner, “Gartner Announces Rankings of Its 2013 Supply Chain Top 25” (May 2013; www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2494115).
2
Gartner, “Gartner Announces Rankings of Its 2012 Supply Chain Top 25” (May 2012; www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2023116).
Subscribe today. Visit insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com.
drive informed business decisions — especially with its SAP ERP
instances expected to process roughly 60,000 transactions each
minute, should Unilever reach its ambitious growth objective.
To address this need, the company began exploring SAP HANA
software as a proof of concept as part of its strategic Value
Engagement partnership with SAP. By 2012, Unilever decided
to implement SAP HANA as an analytic appliance to accelerate
some of its key SAP ERP applications, starting with SAP CO-PA
Accelerator.
“It ties back to doubling our transaction volume,” Béchet
says. “Our worldwide business is totally dependent on growing
to scale with SAP software. We are very interested in anything
that can help improve performance, scalability, and transac-
tional reporting, and for us that included being part of that
SAP HANA journey in the early days.”
Unilever accomplished two major objectives by implement-
ing SAP CO-PA Accelerator, powered by SAP HANA. The first
was to further reduce its month-end financial close to within
one day, giving Unilever tangible evidence that SAP HANA
could deliver on its promise of increased speed. This achieve-
ment gave Unilever the confidence that, moving forward, SAP
HANA could help improve other business processes.
“We had business users
telling us they absolutely
couldn’t live without
SAP HANA.”
— Marc Béchet, Global ERP
Vice President, Unilever
“Our SAP HANA implementation helped tremendously with
a business scenario where there was an urgent need,” Béchet
explains. “But, perhaps more importantly, we gained experi-
ence and built a foundation for SAP HANA. And as an accel-
erator contained to a single (critical) business process, it was a
fairly secure, low-risk use case. If it didn’t work out, we could
fall back to a traditional database.”
 In tandem with this accomplishment, business end
users let Béchet’s team know that, at least from their
perspective, SAP HANA had now become business criti-
cal and that they should do everything possible to avoid
falling back to the traditional technology.
“We had business users telling us they absolutely
couldn’t live without SAP HANA, so that was a big
testament to the value the technology was bringing,”
Béchet says.
He emphasizes that the SAP HANA initiative focuses
on accelerating operational work and improving deci-
sion making in near real time, with analytics embedded
directly in the SAP systems and working directly on
transaction data. “The initiative does not replace but
rather complements our important global Enterprise
Data Warehouse (EDW) strategy for reporting and ana-
lytics, where ERP data is extracted, transformed, and
loaded as well as combined with data external to our
ERP systems,” he says. “For SAP HANA as well as for
our EDW strategy, the quality of the underlying ERP
transaction data is critical to the quality of insights and
decision making. To strengthen the foundation and get
the full business benefits of new real-time insights from
SAP HANA as well as from traditional EDW analytics,
we are continuously working on further simplifying and
harmonizing our ERP transaction systems.”
Another accomplishment was more big picture in
scale. In implementing SAP CO-PA Accelerator pow-
ered by SAP HANA across four SAP ERP instances in
just 16 weeks, and managing it as a single global plat-
form, Unilever validated its new ERP innovation model.
It could, it was shown, achieve rapid global innovation
through just four instances of an industrial-grade solu-
tion, delivering the scale, resilience, and reliability the
company needed.
“Yes, we want to innovate globally faster and more
productively, and the key is that we want to do it once
— not four or more times,” Béchet says. “By manag-
ing the ERP instances as one global platform, we could
do that. We took the approach of developing once and
deploying everywhere, which was an early example of
how we can move very fast, at scale. Now, we are run-
ning a critical business process for Unilever’s €50 billion
business worldwide on SAP HANA.”
From Push to Pull
Having seen, then, what SAP HANA could deliver as an
early ramp-up customer, Unilever was open to explor-
ing other SAP HANA use cases, such as optimizing the
Subscribe today. Visit insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com.
end-to-end planning process to maximize in-store, on-
shelf availability for new product launches or during pro-
motions. With several use cases in the proof-of-concept
stage, Unilever did expand its SAP HANA implementa-
tions to accelerate other applications within SAP ERP
Financials, namely SAP Cash Forecasting and product
cost planning functionality.
With SAP HANA powering its cash forecasting
analysis, Unilever could analyze roughly 150 million
monthly records in about half the time. And product cost
forecasts that had taken about seven minutes were being
completed in about 30 seconds, giving Unilever a better
understanding of the profitability of its products.
According to Thomas Benthien, Global Director for
Finance in Unilever’s ERP Center of Excellence, the
initial benefits of SAP HANA have led to a change in
Accelerating Month-End Closing
with SAP CO-PA Accelerator
Powered by SAP HANA
Unilever now runs 4.5 billion records for
general ledger line items and more than 400
million records for controlling and profitability
analysis in SAP HANA, and the production
system has been dramatically accelerated.
Best-case achievements are as follows:
•M
 aterial ledger went from 5-7 hours runtime
to 1.7 hours (66% reduction)
•C
 ost center assessment time decreased from
11 hours to 6.7 hours (39%)
• T op-down distribution products went from
more than 11 hours to 7.6 hours (32%)
• T op-down distribution customers went from
60 hours to about 35 hours (40%)
•C
 ontrolling and profitability analysis report-
ing is now 10 times faster with an improved
user experience
Company Snapshot
Headquarters: London
Industry: Consumer goods
Employees: 175,000
Revenue: €51 billion
Company details:
• Unilever formed in 1930 when Dutch margarine
company Margarine Unie merged with British
soap maker Lever Brothers
• Lever Brothers was founded in 1885 by William
Hesketh Lever; the soap-making company
diversified into foods in the early 20th century,
beginning with fish, ice cream, and canned foods
• Margarine Unie formed through mergers with
other margarine companies in the 1920s
• Unilever’s personal care products, including
Dove, Clear, and Vaseline, accounted for
€4.4 billion of a total €12.2 billion in revenue
for the first quarter of 2013; food products
such as Knorr, Lipton, and Hellmann’s amassed
revenues of €3.4 billion
• 55% of Unilever sales are in emerging markets;
Unilever products are sold in 190 countries
• 14 Unilever brands account for €1 billion or
more in yearly sales
• With approximately $13 billion in sales each
year, ice cream represents Unilever’s biggest
product category; the company introduced its
best-selling ice cream brand, Magnum, to the
$10 billion US market in 2011
SAP solutions:
• SAP ERP
• SAP Business Suite
• SAP SCM
• SAP HANA
• SAP solutions for EPM
• SAP APO
• SAP CO-PA Accelerator
Subscribe today. Visit insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com.
IT philosophy. As he explains, not only is IT innovating faster,
but SAP HANA also helped drive a change from a push to a pull
mentality; whereas IT once pushed solutions to certain func-
tions, the ERP Center of Excellence has demonstrated business
opportunities, and savvy stakeholders from the functions are
now pulling SAP HANA solutions in order to support the busi-
ness growth agenda. This includes current proofs of concept
on powering many components of SAP Business Suite and SAP
solutions for enterprise performance management (EPM) on
SAP HANA, including SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP
SCM), SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization (SAP APO), SAP
Trade Promotion Management, and SAP Business Planning and
Consolidation.
According to Béchet, leveraging SAP HANA to drive speed and
efficiency in Unilever’s trade promotion processes is of particular
interest, as trade promotions drive a sizable percentage of sales
transactions. As part of Unilever’s regular innovation workshops
it holds with strategic partner Accenture as well as with SAP,
an idea was formed to utilize SAP HANA to optimize how
Unilever allocates stock, leading to more timely and efficient
trade promotions.
Historically, Unilever assigned stock on a sequential basis to
match orders coming in. This process is sufficient when there’s
enough inventory on hand, but otherwise it can become diffi-
cult to decide how best to allocate limited resources. A customer
executing an important promotion, for example, would find the
same percentage of an order unfulfilled as a customer without
a promotion. Using SAP HANA’s real-time analytic capabilities,
Unilever could match orders against inventory at any given time,
instantly run profitability scenarios, and optimize the allocation
of inventory. This real-time information would allow the com-
pany to minimize any impact to current promotions in the event
of inventory shortages.
“With SAP HANA, our system will have the performance to
do that on the fly, something just not possible previously,”
Béchet says.
Looking Ahead
This idea is just one example of how Unilever collaborated
with its strategic partners to identify what Béchet refers to as
a “funnel of projects” related to SAP’s in-memory technology.
One of those projects, currently in the early planning stages, is to
move Unilever’s entire SAP Business Suite onto the SAP HANA
platform.
“It’s a journey of innovation, and we’re working with SAP and
Accenture on the next steps. We know SAP Business Suite pow-
ered by SAP HANA is now in general release. But we are also
running some of the biggest SAP ERP systems in the industry,
and we need to move to new technologies in a risk-managed
way at the right point in the maturity cycle,” Béchet explains.
“We had thought this would be two years out or so, but right
now, we’re seeing things moving much faster than we had
anticipated, so we may very well move our SAP Business Suite
onto SAP HANA sooner than that.”