current and new product innovation and portfolio management are important. Innovation is critical to sustaining Unilever’s growth. “We see product innovation as one of the key drivers of top-line growth,” says Huw Evans, R&D director of information in Unilever’s Home and Personal Care Division. However, Unilever’s complex SKU portfolio had no global standard set of terminology and models. There were many regional differences, making it difficult to react and respond to the market, and to the changing cost and availability of raw materials. Global visibility of entire product portfolio and raw-material specifications was needed.

Unilever recognized that common to addressing all of these business challenges is the need for joined-up product information, organizationally, geographically, and across the full product lifecycle. This meant complete, integrated product information, managed and accessible across the business from product idea generation to product delisting. Unilever needed technology that would be a “change agent” to transform its business processes and culture. Company managers decided to implement Siemens’ Simatic IT Interspec as a foundational step in their use of PLM technology.

The company has worked with Siemens, the German-based technology vendor, for more than a decade on product specification management and common models, terminology and work processes. It was able to achieve global visibility for all raw-material specifications and an order-of-magnitude reduction in the number of specifications in the organization.

Things really began coming together in the packaging area—one of the most dynamically changing parts of product design and one of the longest lead time components, due to involving many organizations and activities prior to final approval and release.

Most FMCG companies go through a major packaging redesign on all of their major brands about every three years. With the current “green” packaging initiatives of major retailers such as Wal-Mart and Tesco, and other initiatives to lower the carbon footprint, packaging design is in a constant state of change. New packaging designs must also take into account the ability of the manufacturing sites to handle the new designs. There are conveyance issues, filling issues, and coding and labeling issues, just to name a few. Packaging materials technology continues to evolve at a break-neck pace, further adding to the complexity and rapid change.

Knowledge management played a major role in enabling Unilever to realize such benefits across the end-to-end package design process. The net result of this changing culture was that Unilever was named Wal-Mart’s 2007 supplier of the year for sustainable engagement and Tesco’s international supplier of the year for the second year running.

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