Unilever continues to empower teams with emerging technologies

Friday, 22 March 2019 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Unilever Sri Lank Ltd. rolled out VEGA, a Robotics Process Automation (RPA) based intelligent report generation tool recently.

This is part of a renewed effort by the company to leverage technology and empower teams with the right tools that will help them reduce their involvement with repetitive tasks and better focus on actions where they can add greater value.

“At Unilever, we take great pride in our people. Made up of some of the best minds in the country, they help us take our brands closer to consumers. We always constantly seek newer ways to empower them,” said Unilever Sri Lanka Finance Director Priyadharshana Ekanayake. “As part of this effort, the deployment of VEGA in our company is one of our pioneering initiatives.”

Developed in partnership with the Unilever Enterprise and Technology solutions team, the cutting-edge solution VEGA is tasked with is automatically generating daily sales reports by interacting with and sourcing data from multiple internal systems and databases.

The reports were previously generated manually, with teams having to spend close to 200 hours per year on them.

Being relieved of this cumbersome task, they will now be able to direct their time and effort to interpreting the data from these reports and better support management in the decision-making process.

Unilever Sri Lanka has also automated some of its backend tasks such as the creation of codes for new customers and SKUs, detection of anomalies in forms, data sets and data archiving. Intelligent systems deliver predictive analytics to the company’s sales teams, helping them identify the correct market demand early on.

Teams also leverage on the capabilities of Microsoft Office 365 to work from anywhere and better collaborate with one another.

The company has also started deploying Power BI, a business analytics tool that can be used across functions to drive data driven decisions.

Globally, Unilever is exploring means of leveraging Block Chain technology, Cognitive Automation and Machine Learning amongst others, together with its business partners. This is set to be amalgamated as a part of its system landscape in the coming days.

“Encouraged by the feedback we have received from our teams, we are working on developing the next wave of such tools that will empower them to do more,” he added.

Unilever Sri Lanka is one of the largest FMCG companies in Sri Lanka, with 28 market leading brands in categories such as Home Care, Personal Care and Foods.