Unilever, a global manufacturer of fast moving consumer goods such as energy drinks, processed foods, beverages, ice creams, beauty products, cleaning agents has a strong dominance in over 190 countries around the world. While the company is headquartered in London, it had its Global Procurement team working from Singapore.
For a company like Unilever, considering that they rely on a global supply chain, raw material sourcing is a huge challenge and pricing for raw materials extremely volatile. They have a constant need to source construction materials such as silica, chloro alkalies, and coal to build factory units that manufacture FMCG products. The cost of these construction materials are constantly impacted by various factors like production costs, global supply and demand, bank financing costs, logistics, shipping and docking costs, forex rates, fuel rates, transportation charges, commodity rates and inflation.
At the time, Unilever had dedicated personnel to aggregate data from various sources and present to the decision makers who needed to understand in real time any major change in trend on any of the above factors to the extent it would directly impact the procurement cost of these materials.
This process caused a lot of unnecessary work and overhead, not to mention human-error, which led to poor decision making and ultimately started affecting the company's bottom line.
Unilever decided it was time to build an application that would automate the data aggregation process. This data could then be presented to decision makers in a nicely readable format in a dashboard
They reached out to several companies for the project but finalized the agreement with Asahi Tech as we were able to demonstrate our superior expertise in automation tools, showed the most understanding of the project scope and proposed a definitive timeframe for the development.
We were perfectly positioned to advise the client on the automation solution most suited for this requirement as we had standing partnerships with UiPath and Automation Anywhere, 2 of the 3 major automation service providers in the market. Based on our recommendation, the client chose UiPath as their automation platform to extract and parse data from the sites.
The application is currently live and available here and accessible only to users with the right credentials.