The Customer

Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company headquartered in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy drink, toothpaste, pet food, pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare products, tea, breakfast cereals, beauty products, and personal care. The products of are available in around 190 countries.

Unilever Pakistan Limited, formerly Lever Brothers Pakistan Limited, is a 70-year-old Pakistani fast-moving consumer goods company based in Karachi. It is a subsidiary of the British multinational company.

 Unilever Pakistan is an organization driven by a purpose and wants to create a better business, a better world and better customers. It believes in its employees who are not defined by their job titles, but by the positive impact they make through the work they do.

The Challenge

• The number one challenge was the diversity of the products that Unilever produces
• The factories are spread throughout the country
• There were up to 7 codes for one item and in some cases same code was assigned to 7 different items, while working in excel
• The RYK plant was in a remote area of the country and in case of breakdowns of the machinery the parts had to be fetched from at least 400 kilometers away
• Another challenge was how to integrate the licensed off-the-shelf product with a rudimentary text-based ERP that was in its infancy at that time

The Solution

• The solution was an Enterprise Maintenance Management system which should reduce breakdowns as much as possible
• Unilever and SysTech sat down, had several meetings to plan how to implement a maintenance management system across its five plants and one head office
• The conclusion was to implement one plant at a time and spread the activities over a period of two years
• One of the challenges was that due to the different nature of the products being produced, it was not possible to replicate one implementation over the other manufacturing unit.
• The RYK plant was taken at the first. This plant was producing more than 17 products. The implementation took more than one year. The remote location of this plant posed too many challenges
• The two Tea manufacturing plants were taken in second phase: Brook Bond and Lipton. Brook Bond again was in a very remote area. Travel was only possible via trains. Staff had very low literacy levels and hence implementation was difficult
• The edible oil company called Dalda was taken thereafter. The difficulty here was that it was a very old plant and safety measures were scarce. Labor unionized environment also posed its challenges, i.e., resistance against automation.
• The last challenge was of integrating these five implementations with their ERP system. Coding between the two software, though difficult, was not a major challenge. However, ascertaining the scope of integration was. We had more than 15 meetings with different stakeholders to ascertain which field to map with which field in the EAM software.
• Nevertheless, the project of five manufacturing sites and one head office which included maintenance, inventory and purchasing functions completed within a span of two years

The Benefits

• Reduction in breakdowns of equipment resulting in increase of production
• Integrated manufacturing activities with their focal ERP system
• Reduction of stock of spare parts
• Smoothly integrated process of purchasing including vendor management