Unilever: Application and HR Outsourcing

Unilever is a leader in the food and personal care brands, with 12 brands that generate more than US$1 billion each in revenues. In a recent agreement, Accenture signed a seven-year contract to provide application outsourcing including applications development, implementation and support for Unilever across Europe.

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As a global leader and a fast-growing company, Unilever has faced two mega-trends: managing the multinational workforces within acquired companies in emerging markets and brutal brand competition. In this environment, survival has meant adjusting rapidly.

In a recent agreement, Accenture signed a seven-year contract to provide application outsourcing including applications development, implementation and support for Unilever across Europe. The contract is part of Unilever's "One Unilever" program, which is designed to deliver annual savings of €700 million (US$927 million) through the implementation of a unified and streamlined operating model for the company. The contract covers the provision of IT services to Unilever's operations in 25 European countries. As part of this, the team will deploy a unified European IT platform. Accenture expects to deliver the services from six countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Hungary.

Building on this relationship, Unilever teamed with Accenture HR BPO Services to provide a broad range of human resources services—including payroll administration, reward administration, performance management, workforce reporting and core HR administration—in 100 countries under a seven-year business process outsourcing pact. In addition, HR services are provided to more than 200,000 Unilever employees in more than 20 languages from delivery centers in Bangalore, Manila, Dalian, Bucharest, Prague and Curitiba. Unilever's global HR staff of approximately 3,300 will be part of this transformation. It is expected that fewer than half of these will be affected by the transition of roles and services to Accenture.

"This deal allows us to create a simpler, more agile European IT function to better support Unilever's growth agenda," said Neil Cameron, Unilever's chief information officer.

According to Reg Bull, Unilever senior vice president, Unilever's selection of Accenture HR BPO Services hinged on meeting the operational people and knowing they had the depth to deliver, rather than just a wild set of aspirations.

Leading companies know that human and organizational performance are key determinants of high performance—and more and more organizations are using outsourcing to help them gain the most business advantage from their HR functions, clearly a strategy adopted by Unilever.

The HR outsourcing agreement extends an existing relationship between the two companies under which Accenture has been providing management consulting and IT services to Unilever for more than 10 years.

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