120 years of innovation moves to the cloud
- €50.7B Total revenue in 2020
- 2.5B People using products each day
- 190 Countries in which products are sold
Every day, over 2.5 billion people use Unilever products to feel good, look good, and get more out of life.
Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of beauty and personal care, home care, and food and refreshment products. From iconic global brands like Dove, Magnum, and Knorr to brands like Love Beauty & Planet, Hourglass Cosmetics, and The Vegetarian Butcher, Unilever has a unique opportunity to make sustainable living commonplace.
“Back in 1883, Sunlight Soap was launched in the U.K. by our founder,” says Andy Hill, global vice president of data and analytics at Unilever. “It was pioneering, it was innovative, and it had a purpose: to popularize cleanliness and bring it within reach of ordinary people. That was sustainable living, even then. We now have over 400 brands, and we’re still driven by purpose.”
A €51B business puts data at the center
Unilever’s vision is to be the global leader in sustainable business and to demonstrate how its purpose-led, future-fit business model drives superior performance. It has a long tradition of being a progressive, responsible business. This goes back to the days of founder William Lever, who launched Sunlight Soap more than 100 years ago, and it’s at the heart of how Unilever operates today.
The Unilever Compass, Unilever’s sustainable business strategy, sets out to deliver superior performance and drive sustainable and responsible growth, while:
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Improving the health of the planet
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Improving people's health, confidence, and well-being
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Contributing to a fairer and more socially inclusive world
Competing globally and accelerating growth in core, emerging, and high-growth markets means Unilever must move beyond descriptive analytics that rely on historical insights to more predictive analytics.
Changes in consumer purchasing behaviors through omnichannel, direct-to-consumer, and recent product trends (e.g., plant-based and organic products) demand better use of data and advanced analytics to truly meet the needs of consumers.
“One of our fundamental aims is to make Unilever data intelligent, where we use data to support all business decisions,” says Hill. “As tools and technologies mature, we want to support this decision-making with more advanced analytics, becoming more predictive and prescriptive in our use of analytics and AI throughout the business.”
Achieving Unilever’s goal of becoming more predictive and prescriptive requires a modern cloud architecture capable of integrating disparate data sources with varying data types.
“We need to ensure that data is available everywhere to unlock faster and better decision-making, leveraging both internal and external data and structured and unstructured data to support human decisions with machine learning and prescriptive analytics capabilities,” Hill shares.
Internal data includes sales, forecasting, and supply chain information. External data is integrated from partners such as retailers, wholesalers, and distributors for a better picture of sales, demand, and inventory to better predict future manufacturing needs.
Teradata VantageCloud on Microsoft Azure: The connected, multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics
Unilever turned to VantageCloud on Azure to connect data in marketing, sales, supply chain, human resources (HR), and other lines of business.
“Unilever runs 27 business services on our Teradata platform, leveraging over 230 terabytes of data supporting finance, sales, supply chain, and HR,” says Hill. “This enables approximately thousands of users to run hundreds of reports thousands of times each month to make the business decisions needed to run our organization effectively.”
Unilever’s cloud modernization has realized multiple benefits. Newfound agility allows Unilever to scale up and down to support demands from its users.
“The cloud offers a level of flexibility which is very difficult to achieve with an on-premises estate,” says Hill. “It allows us to scale our infrastructure up and down at the touch of a button, without the need of going through the rigmarole of procuring, installing, and maintaining hardware.”
Hill also shared a common cloud sentiment: “[The cloud] also enables us to avoid up-front capital infrastructure expenditure, which we can instead put toward more value-added activities.”
Cloud migrations of Unilever’s scale are complex
Whether migrating from on premises into the cloud or from one cloud provider to another, cloud migrations are more than moving data. Organizations with complex data analytics ecosystems have multitudes of systems, servers, applications, and tools that feed or rely on the data platform. All of these must be considered when migrating to the cloud.”
“Given the size and importance of our environment, this migration was a very complex activity which took approximately nine months end to end,” says Hill. “It involved migrating not only Teradata but over 80 other servers critical to the operation of the platform.”
Unilever’s successful cloud migration to VantageCloud on Azure involved forefront planning to identify connections and dependencies, ensuring the platform continued to operate post-migration and with business users seeing no difference.
“The main challenge we faced was simply the scale of the migration,” says Hill. “The logistics of migrating such a complex platform to the cloud with all the necessary testing, and then ensuring that the production cutover could be done within an acceptable time window for the business, was an immense effort.”
120 years of innovation, now in the cloud
From its founding in 1883 with Sunlight Soap to today’s 400 brands in 190 countries, innovation has been central to the Unilever purpose. The cloud represents the next generation of innovation for years to come at Unilever.
“We’ve been pioneers, innovators, and future-makers for over 120 years,” says Hills. “We plan to continue doing that, and we plan to do it sustainably. This is how we’ll grow our business.”
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