Unilever: Upgrading European SAP Platform

Accenture has helped Unilever establish a global SAP platform to manage its business and meet sustainable growth targets.

Facing growing competition and globalization challenges, Unilever in 2006 worked with Accenture to simplify and standardize operations, and roll out a single SAP platform across its European businesses. Once this platform was running in 26 countries, the next phase was to upgrade it to strengthen Unilever’s position and prepare it for continued growth.

Unilever wanted to upgrade its entire SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that supports all its European operations with order-to-cash, purchase-to-pay, make-to-deliver, cost-to-control and sales and operations planning (S&OP) management processes. Based on our earlier successful SAP implementation with the company, Unilever turned to Accenture for this crucial system upgrade.

Given the scale and complexity of this project, Accenture:

• Assembled an experienced team to plan and coordinate the activities in close collaboration with Unilever’s ERP Center of Excellence over a nine-month period.

• Leveraged its Upgrade Bridge asset to assess and outline the full scope of work, and utilized resources at the Upgrade Center of Excellence.

• Provided end-to-end testing and support for this ERP upgrade to the SAP ECC 6.0 platform.

Accenture’s implementation of this SAP-based solution has provided Unilever with a full set of enhanced functionalities and cost-saving opportunities, especially in its supply chain and finance functions.

With minimal disruption to European business operations during the multicountry project, the key benefits of this project include:

• Improved customer service with flexible and responsive supply chain operations

• Improved system performance due to faster resolution of technical bottlenecks

• Reduced reporting time due to improved system performance