CASE STUDY

Unilever Home and Personal Care North America

Order to Cash Process Creates
World-Class Supply Chain

Challenge
Unilever Home and Personal Care North America needed to replace a 20- “The Clarkston Consulting team is
year old mainframe legacy system with one that would be more responsive absolutely dedicated to getting the
to the company’s changing needs, and more importantly, the needs of their
job done. They bring people with the
customers.
right expertise to the project who have
direct knowledge of the consumer
Solution products industry.”
Created a unified, real-time view of the entire Order to Cash process to Al Marshall, Director,
establish a world-class supply chain and implement common business pro- Supply Chain Integration,
cesses across the organization. Unilever HPC-NA

Benefits
Access to accurate real-time data enables the organization to better meet
the needs of their customers through:

• Reduced cycle times

• Simplified custom pallet processes
• Increased invoice and shipping accuracy
• Enhanced visibility to information across the supply chain

Copyright © 2004 Clarkston Consulting. All rights reserved.

 Challenge
Unilever Home and Personal Care North America (Unile-
ver HPC-NA) had been operating on a 20 year-old main-
frame legacy system, which did not have the capacity to
CASE STUDY | Unilever Home and Personal Care North America
respond quickly to meet either the company’s changing
needs or the demands of its customers. Additionally, the
system lacked the capacity to enable the integration of
information across the organization, and changes to the
system were expensive and required long lead-times. This
outdated system was ultimately affecting customer ser-
vice levels due to inefficient order management and ful-
fillment procedures.
The driver behind this project was to install a system that
would provide a platform to meet Unilever HPC-NA’s fu-
ture business needs, handle planned growth, and provide
superior customer service capabilities. Unilever HPC-NA
partnered with Clarkston Consulting to develop and exe-
cute a strategic plan to accomplish its business objectives,
and replace 15 legacy applications with a fully integrated
system and simplified business processes. Additionally,
it was imperative that this implementation be completely
transparent to the trade, with no interruption to service or
order processing and fulfillment.
Solution
The creation of a unified, real-time view of the entire Or-
der to Cash (OTC) process was part of Unilever HPC-
NA’s strategic initiative to establish a world-class supply
chain and implement common business processes across
the organization. Clarkston was selected as the imple-
mentation partner for the OTC implementation because
of its knowledge, expertise, and ability to align technol-
ogy solutions with business drivers.
Clarkston worked in collaboration with Unilever HPC-
NA to simplify business processes throughout the orga-
nization and migrate the OTC process off of the legacy
mainframe. By simplifying the OTC cycle and integrat-
ing processes onto a common platform, Unilever HPC-
NA could better service its customers through quicker
response and shorter lead-times on order fills. Clarkston
provided project management, technical support, and
training and change management assistance throughout
the project.
Copyright © 2004 Clarkston Consulting. All rights reserved.
An essential component to the success of this project
was the team approach between Unilever HPC-NA and
Clarkston. In order to create a successful implementation
that was transparent to the trade, Unilever committed a
dedicated business team to this project and invested heav-
ily in end-user training.
The goal was to produce a transparent implementation
that would have no negative impact on or disruption of
service to customers.
Benefits
The implementation of the redesigned business pro-
cesses and systems within order management supports a
more efficient supply chain, and helps Unilever HPC-NA
achieve its goal of building a world-class supply chain
organization. Employees benefit from access to more ac-
curate, real-time data, which allows them to better meet
the demands of customers. New process capabilities, such
as automated systems, optimize business processes and
increase the efficiency of operations.
The retirement of Unilever HPC-NA’s legacy system is
projected to result in major annual cost-savings. In addi-
tion to eliminating the mainframe, the new OTC solution
has greatly simplified the IT infrastructure, and mini-
mized support costs by consolidating all major systems
onto the existing enterprise platform and simplifying the
interface architecture. Additionally, the new OTC system
and elimination of the mainframe allow Unilever HPC-
NA to increase customer satisfaction by:
• Reducing order cycle times.
• Simplifying custom pallet processes.
• Increasing invoice and shipment accuracy.
• Improving supply chain information visibility.
• Providing access to real-time, accurate data.
• Creating a platform to meet future customer de-
mands, and a scalable system for growth.
Extensive testing, simulation, and collaboration between
the business drivers and technology solutions resulted in
an implementation that was virtually invisible to the trade.
Customers experienced no shipment delays, and will ben-
efit from decreased order cycle times and increased ac-
curacy of order fills.
2
 Company Profile
Unilever is one of the world’s largest consumer products
companies with annual sales of approximately $47 billion
in 2002. It produces and markets a wide-range of foods
CASE STUDY | Unilever Home and Personal Care North America

and home and personal care products, including such

leading brands as Dove, Suave, Wisk, Lipton, Hellman’s,
Ben & Jerry’s and Slim-Fast. Unilever operates in 88
countries around the globe and employs approximately
258,000 people. Visit Unilever at www.unilever.com.

Clarkston Consulting is a leading management and technology consulting firm that provides strategic business solutions for clients
within the life sciences and consumer products industries worldwide. These market leaders turn to Clarkston to help them bridge
the gap between strategy and execution to sustain a competitive advantage. Clarkston is a sought-after business partner because
of its recognized industry thought-leadership and superior client relationships, as measured by The Conference Board’s survey on
client satisfaction. For more information, visit www.clarkstonconsulting.com.

Copyright © 2004 Clarkston Consulting. All rights reserved. 3