MARKET DISCOVERY DASHBOARD FOR UNILEVER

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.

Business requirements

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  Automate data scraping from 70 different websites, which have information indicative of market trends.
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  Analyze the data, make meaningful inferences from them and present them as easily digestible graphs and charts in a dashboard.
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  Make this dashboard accessible to decision makers and other relevant members across multiple teams in the organization.
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  Receive notification emails whenever a metric (foreign exchange, diesel rates, national repo rate, etc.) breached a certain threshold so that the procurement team could take the necessary measures proactively.

Challenges

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  The format of data on the websites monitored by Unilever was constantly changing, making it difficult for an automated process to pinpoint the right information to be extracted.
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  Depending on the significance of the data being extracted and its volatility, the frequency of crawling had to be different across the 70 sites ranging form twice a day to once a month.
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  In some cases, the URLs themselves could not be fixed in advance for the application to crawl. They had to be determined on the fly as the URLs had the date affixed to them.
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  Much of the information to be used was available in files to be downloaded from different URLs. So, it required the files to be downloaded, and information from them parsed before useful information could be extracted from them.

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.