Accenture helps Unilever meet its sustainable growth targets by upgrading its European SAP platform, ensuring minimal

business disruption

Unilever is one of the worlds leading suppliers of fast-moving consumer goods. With some 400 brands across four food, refreshment, home and personal care categories, no other company touches so many peoples lives in so many different ways. In fact, on any given day, two billion people across 190 countries use Unilever products. In 2011, the company reported turnover of 46.5 billion (approximately US$61.4 billion).

was running across 26 countries, the next phase was to upgrade it to strengthen Unilevers position and prepare it for continued growth.

Business Challenge
The challenge was to upgrade the entire SAP ERP system while making sure that European business operations continued to operate smoothly. This project would involve Unilevers main transactional platform, which supports all European operations with Order-to-Cash, Purchaseto-Pay, Make-to-Deliver, Cost-to-Control and Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) management processes, spanning 26 countries, 65 factories and more than 14,000 end users.

Summary
Consumer goods giant Unilever has entrusted Accenture to support it in its journey to establish a global SAP platform. This standardized platform will help Unilever manage and grow its business to meet its sustainable growth targets doubling the size of its company while reducing its environmental impact. When Unilever faced growing competitive pressures and globalization challenges in 2006, the company worked with Accenture to simplify and standardize operations and roll out a single SAP platform across the enterprise in Europe. Once that platform

How Accenture Helped

Given the scale and complexity of this project and the risk of disruption to the business, and because of Accentures successful SAP implementation experience with Unilever, the company turned to Accenture to implement this crucial upgrade project. Accenture assembled an experienced team to plan and coordinate the activities in close collaboration with Unilevers ERP Center of Excellence over a nine-month period.

This team combined the deep Unileverspecific knowledge held in the outsourcing team along with the technical skills of other Accenture teams, such as the India Delivery Centers Upgrade Center of Excellence. Accenture leveraged its Upgrade Bridge asset to assess and outline the full scope of the upgrade and utilized resources at the Upgrade Center of Excellence to perform all technical upgrade activities, stabilization and component test and fixing. Being careful to maintain a balance between client budget constraints, business critical functionalities and technical systems affected by the upgrade, the Accenture team began with a planning and analysis phase to define the full scope of product and regression testing needed. Overall, Accenture provided end-to-end testing, support and deployment for this ERP upgrade to the SAP ECC 6.0 platform. This project encompassed: Stabilization and Component Testing: Performance of technical upgrade rehearsals in the development environment, including fixing of key transactions and component testing of all functionalities affected by the upgrade Milestone Planning and Effort Estimates: Creation of accurate and realistic plans and estimates for each step of process Product Testing: Testing of all functionalities potentially affected by the upgrade, including all business critical scenarios User Acceptance Testing: Provision of support and issue resolution for more than 1,000 concurrent users across Europe on a fully connected environment Regression Testing: Execution of manual user scenarios testing and automatic and manual regression testing for more than 5,000 scenarios for two test cycles involving 900 users. A key success factor was the simulation of the cutover
Copyright 2012 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

into a fully integrated Regression Test environment. Performance Testing: Review and enhancement of transactions included in the performance testing scenarios. Execution of multiple cycles, with baselines and simulated production-like situations with strong governance of corrective actions Deployment and Post Go-Live Support: Implementation of upgraded system platform to more than 14,000 end users, moving quickly and successfully from the simulation phase to integration testing

High Performance Delivered

Adding to the benefits achieved previously when Accenture helped move all European business to a single ERP environment, Accentures implementation of this SAPbased solution has provided Unilever with a full set of enhanced functionalities and cost-saving opportunitiesespecially in its supply chain and financials functions. According to Willem Eelman, CIO, Unilever, The upgraded platform is stable and robust. This contributed to our decision to choose the European design as the template for a convergence SAP implementation for the Americas, which is part of a global convergence strategy at Unilever. This implementation effort is an excellent example of the spirit of collaboration and partnership that thrives between Unilever and Accenture. Key benefits gained by implementing this SAP systems upgrade include: Continued improvement in customer and consumer service levels due to more flexible and responsive supply chain operations Increased systems performance due to improved resolution of technical bottlenecks Reduced reporting time due to increased system performance Minimal disruption to European business operations during the multi-country project, which spanned all critical process areas

We chose Accenture for this crucial upgrade project not only because of our established, long-term working relationship but because we knew Accenture could execute on a technical upgrade on a scale as large as this one. The potential risk embedded in this type of upgrade required experienced and technical resources. In addition, we knew Accenture could manage the level of coordination required in the face of significant ongoing change, without causing disruption to existing systems during the upgrade.
Colin Dittmer, Global Supply Chain Director, ERP (Enterprise Business Solutions), Unilever

For further information, please contact: Alberto Cavalli Senior Executive alberto.cavalli@accenture.com +39 335 1332256 Drew Cameron Global Technology LeadUnilever drew.cameron@accenture.com +44 7710 996832

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 246,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the worlds most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.com.