Disruptive Technology Project – Unilever’s FSR department

Group 84

Link video: https://youtu.be/7l6jPIQfGBE

This project is about the Field Sales Retail (FSR) department of Unilever. FSR gathers data from 150 sales representatives on a daily basis. However, the department is facing some difficulties with data integration and data collection. Therefore, we decided to take a closer look at FSR’s current information systems and to come up with an innovative IT-enabled service that will transform their business.

The main value proposition of FSR is generated by realizing an optimal store floor execution. Their short term goal is to generalize more revenue by focusing on maximizing Unilever’s share of shelf space. The added-value comes from extra selling to customers, promotional activities and service in the stores. In order to know which promotional campaigns work well and which don’t, FSR needs data. FSR makes use of four main kinds of information systems to gather this data: Box App, Box.net, Planorama and Prime. The focus of this business case is Prime: a global application that keeps track of all in store activities of sales representative. The instability of the system results in mistakes in the financial household of the company, which then results in incorrect data and conclusions.

We interviewed several stakeholders to identify and further explore the issues which FSR is facing. Among them were the manager of the department, a former employee and sales representatives. The following problems regarding to Prime were identified: (1) synchronization often fails, (2) data can’t be processed when one or more variables are missing, (3) the system crashes often, (4) the team doesn’t get a notification when new data is available, (4) data can’t be changed after synchronization, (5) the system is owned by a third party, (6) the system is globally implemented and can’t be adapted to country-specific needs and (7) making a change to the system is very expensive and takes long to implement. These problems lead to data loss, inaccurate data, inappropriate data, employee frustration, slow decision making and communication flaws.

We recommend that Unilever will invest in a new system for FSR with the following features: (1) all four information systems are integrated, (2) the system is flexible and agile, (3) GPS, (4), automatic backups, (5) notifications in case of data updates and (6) a user friendly system. Although developing a system is very costly, we do expect that the annual increase in revenue will compensate. To make sure the development- and implementation process goes right we provide the following recommendations: (1) acquire a generous budget, (2) continuously communicate with higher management layers, (3) involve employees during the requirement specification, (4) start with a pilot before global implementation, (5) implement a valid security system, (6) specify compulsory data fields for global statistics, (7) provide user-trainings for all employees and (8) don’t work together with third parties, but keep the development process in-house. We believe that the mentioned features, combined with the managerial recommendations will lead to a huge improvement for Unilever.