Cutting-edge technology
As digital transformation continues to advance at such a rapid pace, it is becoming more and more common for organizations to be experiencing it. Businesses are saving time and money, empowering employees to evolve in many ways they never have before, and ultimately helping them succeed both at work and away from work.
For Unilever, digital transformation is the future. It has had a transformative impact on the company’s business model and many other aspects of their operation. Top executives of the company want the workers to focus on the digital transformation. They believe that this is the best way to meet consumer expectations. According to CIO Jane Moran, this is very empowering for employees because it helps them lead a successful change in business. “What’s changing is the way we connect with people, making data available to a broad base of employees, giving them the skills to analyse it in order to come up with better decisions,” Moran says. “This can bring clear benefits, such as increased efficiency but also significant influence on issues crucial to our work, such as sustainability.”
Unilever wants to navigate through data and evidence to provide a glimpse into the future.
Azure IoT platform
Microsoft has played a major role in Unilever’s digital transformation. With Azure as the backbone of their new technologies, they’ve been able to meet client needs by providing better and faster results all while saving time and effort. Unilevel also trained their employees, providing them with all the necessary digital skills.
Thanks to the Azure IoT platform, Unilever has created a next-generation digital model of a physical factory. In this style of factory, machines and equipment are all connected in order to transfer even more data. This enables the company to quickly process information and make smart decisions based on them.
The digital representation of every machine and every process helps workers to have a clear picture of the entire factory. By using machine learning algorithms they collect and analyse data, predicting the outcome of operations. The more data a machine receives, the more it learns, and at a fast pace. Algorithms can now help control a machine or an entire process, reaching high levels of accuracy. Operators can work more accurately, make better decisions, freeing them from repetitive manual tasks and creating consistency throughout their production line. This also increases the productivity of their work.
Unilever has eight digital twins around the world, taking data from 15 of its 300 units and wants to increase this number to 70 units by the end of the year and 100 by 2020. There has been a positive impact on operations so far.
Power BI
By using Power BI, a business analytics tool, to analyse all this information, the employees have instant access to the data they need. With high services from cutting edge technology they solve any problem that arises themselves. This tool helps to increase the company’s efficiency, minimizing irrelevant or erroneous notifications related to production lines.
They also use the Microsoft 365 suite and applications such as SharePoint, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Tools as Teams and Yammer, help the company’s 155,000 employees around the world communicate and share knowledge. Moran says: “In one day we brought together 2,000 engineers, most of whom had never spoken to each other, breaking down any boundaries people might mistakenly set, and bringing together colleagues literally from all over the world.”
This technology transformation is succesfull in all areas, from supply chain, to research and development, and from human resources, to sales. Employees ,because of data and analytics, can make better and faster decisions.”Creating a culture and organisation that harnesses data intelligently across the supply chain journey, and that, with the support of analytics and data, can make better decisions to meet, and continually exceed, consumer expectations,” as Dave Penrith, chief engineer at Unilever, puts it.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
