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SUCCESS STORY

Unilever North America Creates Unified Product Journey with Syndigo

Unilever North America

In the competitive consumer goods landscape, staying ahead means more than just delivering exceptional products. It means ensuring consistent and strong control over the quality of product data throughout a company’s ecosystem, as well as seamless distribution of the same across all relevant recipient channels. Unilever North America (Unilever NA), part of the British multinational brand, has taken the challenge to heart and restitched their content operations practices to deliver comprehensive product information across categories…and across retailers.

Unilever is a vast enterprise that oversees many fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands. One of the world’s largest manufacturers, their products are used by over 3.4 billion customers in 190+ countries. Unilever NA caters to the largest Unilever market globally, and to do so, they rely heavily on the syndication of their product information to their trading partners, ensuring that their product information flows effortlessly for each of the products they sell.

product content syndication

Challenges with product content syndication

As Unilever NA focused on improving their content syndication strategy, they identified key improvement opportunities:

1. Vendor rationalization: As they evolved their e-commerce footprint, Unilever NA engaged with multiple vendors, including Syndigo, to manage their product content syndication across trading partner platforms. While each vendor choice was made to fulfill a specific need, over time it introduced additional complexity in managing product data at scale, especially as retailers grew their
e-commerce presence.

2. Centralized retail requirements and operations: Unilever NA must adhere to multiple retailer mandatories at scale. The inconsistency in data hierarchies across retailers requires a significant level of product information transformation to adhere to each partner’s dynamic taxonomies. This complexity challenged Unilever NA to develop enterprise-class capabilities to efficiently deliver on the variety of retail requirements and performance metrics. Simplifying PIM deployment operations was a key objective to drive data transparency across source systems and reduce manual interventions across the ecosystem.

3. Data quality and completeness: Managing accurate product data for thousands of SKUs across 60+ brands in North America and Canada had become a resource-intensive endeavor. Out of necessity, Unilever’s retail content specialists often addressed product data requirements in the specific retailer portal landing zones. This often led to the root cause—upstream data quality issues—remaining unresolved, leading to frequent re-work and reactive workflows.

With the help of Syndigo, Unilever NA has enhanced their product experience management while increasing the scalability of their operations.

Overhauling syndication strategy

Jim Keyt, Head of Marketing Technology for Unilever, recognized the potential to operate more efficiently while adding to the capabilities his users could access. “We wanted to scale, consolidate, and raise the floor on our approach,” he said. By consolidating their tech stack and streamlining their users’ workflows, they could become more effective in their product content distribution, while ensuring better data quality without having to engage multiple systems.

Unilever NA can operate with a more intentional and systematic approach to managing product data, transforming their operations from reactive to proactive and strategic with the help of Syndigo.

Unilever NA has been able to establish a foundation that doesn’t just address their immediate pain points; it provided a means to enable significant future process improvements:

  • Superior data governance: Consolidated data management including transparent and manageable business rules.
  • Proactive Implementation: Orchestrated a faster and more efficient data migration process by employing a parallel approach during implementation which ensured business continuity and a time to value within months.
  • Internal Competency & Actionable Insights: Developed internal expertise for managing retailer content, reducing reliance on external partners.

Now, Unilever NA can operate with a more intentional and systematic approach to managing product data, transforming their operations from reactive to proactive and strategic. With superior data governance, quick and efficient data migration, and strengthened internal competency, Unilever NA addressed their immediate challenges and created better processes driven by actionable insights. This comprehensive approach reduced reliance on external partners and empowered Unilever NA to accelerate their business with proactive, strategic capabilities for sustained operational excellence and enhanced market impact.

  • Consolidation: A decrease in the number of systems required. More streamlined teams and processes mean increased efficiency overall.
  • Enhanced Product Experience Management: Data quality insights significantly improved content quality, completeness, and efficiency in delivering data to retailers.
  • Process Maturity & Increased Scalability: With the new efficiencies, content managers are now empowered to be more systematic and strategic. They can now spend more time focusing on winning the digital shelf.
Syndigo - Unilever

Beyond the technical capabilities the partnership has established, Unilever NA was highly satisfied with the implementation experience as well. The combined efforts of Syndigo and their mutual partner, Accenture ensured a smooth transition, demonstrating their expertise and commitment to excellence every step of the way.

The implementation of Syndigo’s PXM solution meant that Unilever NA could unlock the potential of their product information across their trading partner ecosystem, enabling a more effective pathway to the physical and digital shelf. This integrated approach streamlined operations and accelerated time to value, enabling Unilever NA to realize material internal and external facing benefits.

Moving toward a more efficient and effective future

With their partnership with Syndigo, Unilever NA not only resolved their initial pain points, but they have also positioned themselves for sustained success in an ever-evolving marketplace. With confidence in their current capabilities, Unilever NA is poised to lead the way in delivering exceptional consumer experiences worldwide.