Unilever Prestige lowers inventory and cuts waste with Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM

Unilever Prestige is a collection of 10 luxury beauty brands including Dermalogica, Tatcha, Hourglass, Living Proof, Murad, Paula’s Choice, Kate Somerville, Ren, Garancia, and K18. One of parent company Unilever’s fastest-growing business units, Unilever Prestige brands have seen double-digit growth for 13 consecutive quarters, with more than 50% of sales coming from online channels.

The company’s challenge came down to this: How could its brands keep running their own nimble supply chains, to react quickly to changing beauty trends, while also gaining the advantages of scale and efficiency that come from being part of a larger organization?

The brands within Unilever Prestige each run their own supply chain and warehouses, and each used its own combination of spreadsheets and demand and supply planning software to support operations. This complexity led to inefficiency, data inaccuracy, and process continuity risks. Adding to the challenge, Unilever Prestige brands tend to have complex planning needs, with small production runs compared to mass beauty companies, long lead times due to international component sourcing, and shelf-life constraints to maintain product freshness.

Unilever Prestige recognized it needed one standard planning tool for all brands to replace the growing number of planning systems across the organization. Key features the company needed included consensus-based and statistical forecasting within the tool, as well as capabilities for exception-based planning and scenario planning. After evaluating options in the market, Unilever Prestige selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Demand Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Planning, part of the Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM) suite. Not only would the tool easily integrate with the company’s existing ERP systems, but it also could generate detailed and executable supply plans and provide robust features for modeling what-if changes to capacity, demand, and supply.

Unilever Prestige is systematically rolling out Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Planning across its brands. In the areas where the implementation is complete, Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Planning helped improve forecast accuracy, streamline planning, and reduce inventory waste.

Unilever Prestige measures forecast bias as the organization’s primary forecast quality assessment. That metric went from +/-20 to +/-10, helping the company more accurately meet market demands and maintain better in-stock rates. Being able to calculate this and other KPIs within the system helped planners across brands quickly assess and update their forecasts.

The company also reduced inventory by 10% on a days-on-hand basis. “That is a combination of system and strategy, but I don't believe that we would have been as successful managing the strategy without the system,” says Gabriella Costilla, senior global supply chain strategy director for Unilever Prestige.

Moving from spreadsheets to Oracle Fusion Cloud Demand Management and Supply Planning also helped improve data quality and reduce human data-entry errors. Having robust data fuels the ability for planning teams to drive integrated business planning with the broader teams. From a supply planning perspective, the company gained a clearer view of what inbound materials its brands will need, and planning teams easily share that view with other areas of the business, including logistics teams.

With the latest implementation in the organization’s international hubs, Unilever Prestige intends to use Oracle Cloud Supply Planning to roll out attribute-based planning for managing for product shelf lives. Previously, that type of planning was done via spreadsheets, which required many hours of manual work. Once the attribute-based planning functionality is live, the company plans to build automations for those processes within Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Planning. The goal is to leverage a common planning tool to establish a community of practice for planning across Unilever Prestige, allowing planners to share knowledge, solve problems together, and provide peer-to-peer support.

Unilever Prestige worked with Oracle partner Trinamix for the most recent implementations. Unilever Prestige averaged a four-month implementation period for each brand, helping to keep the project on schedule. “The relationship with Trinamix definitely helped add another layer of support along with the Oracle team,” says Gabriella Costilla, senior global supply chain strategy director for Unilever Prestige.