Company Background
Unilever Foodsolutions NA (“Unilever”), one of North America’s largest foodservice enterprises, brings expertise behind some leading brands – Lipton, Hellmann’s, and Ben & Jerry’s – to restaurant operators, distributors, and other foodservice operators.
Project Goals & Objective
- Ability to analyze profitability to gain competitive edge in marketplace
- Ability to segment customers and allocate direct and indirect costs to discern profitability
- Web-based tools for on-demand and periodic reporting and analysis
Business Issues
To stay competitive and uncover the true profit contribution of its products and customers, Unilever required an application that could provide segmented data and efficiently deliver the information to users. The challenges of Unilever’s old system included loading invoice data at the customer/product level, allocating data not available at the product/invoice level, and an inability to gather reports on a periodic basis or on-demand.
Ranzal Role
By partnering with Ranzal, Unilever was able to develop an innovation tool for management. It offers the capability to monitor and evaluate customer and product profitability for improved business decisions and a closed loop process necessary to deliver customer profitability analysis.
To fulfill the requirement of timely data delivery, complete automated processes of data loads and consolidations were introduced into production at the close of each business cycle. Another essential requirement was the need for accurate and efficient business rules that would leverage cost drivers to allocate data not loaded at the product/customer level.
The reporting solution provides finance users with the ability to build on-demand reports from Microsoft Excel and management with access to on-line reporting of traditional reports and interactive graphs allowing for segmentation by customers, products, market, and product line for improved business decision-making.
Unilever continues to add functionality to their application. They have developed an intuitive input mechanism allowing users to create what-if scenarios, have provided additional detail data from the data warehouse to improve accuracy, and are able to research new strategies to better define resource consumption.
Business Benefits
- Improved business decisions with ability to monitor and evaluate customer profitability, product profitability, and resource utilization
- Timely data delivery with reporting tools for both finance and management users
- Greater efficiency due to automated process for data loads and consolidation
