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A robust environment needs robust IT

Peter Davidson, Information Age

09/06/2005 14:01:19

Competition is tough in the food and other packaged goods business as manufacturers vie for a few centimetres of shelf space to bring their wares to a shopper's eye line on crowded shelves.

It's even more so in a retail sector dominated by two major Australian retailers.

For CIOs like Unilever's Sue Bartlett it means meeting imperatives in cost management while developing and maintaining robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) architectures to meet manufacturing and supply chain management are critical.

With manufacturing and front-office processes spread across nine sites in Australia and NZ, Unilever's broad portfolio of brands catalogues some of the best known in the world: Liptons, Streets, Rexona, Continental, Omo, Flora and dozens of others. Many are market leaders in value share.

Strong brands are built, and remain so, through strong management - especially when distributed through even stronger retailers like Coles and Woolworths.

For Bartlett, meeting customers' needs requires some management balance when the retailers' requirements need to be meet as well as the end users'. While seeing to internal IT requirements, keeping processes flowing can demand broader collaboration.

She cites an exercise in sitting down with Coles and major manufacturing competitor Proctor & Gamble to find solutions in CPFR (collaborative, planning, forecasting and replenishment) to satisfy the three parties' needs.

"It was interesting exercise, particularly sitting down with P&G, and we did some project work together but a competitive edge isn't necessarily going to come from finding some forecasting solution - it's what you do with it not the actual implementation.

"It's a glib statement, but the thing with IT is what you do with [the solution]. It goes to the heart of good IT strategy: it's driven by the business requirement, not the solution for its own sake."

The key for Unilever, she says, is to create flexibility through good architecture, and not be dictated to by external interests - "that can be disastrous".

It's a philosophy developed over a career which started at Unilever and she has remained there ever since: "It's an unusual company in that longevity of service here is typical - people tend to stay a long time."

Her start she describes as an "accident" having completed business studies at University in London with an ambition to pursue marketing, she took a role at Unilever there and got involved with Oracle databases working as a programmer and later in project management.

"It was my IT apprenticeship and every time I got a bit bored as I got to the end of a useful role, something else turned up", including a move to the Anglo-Dutch company's Rotterdam headquarters.

The European experience was soon to see distinct cultural change: taking up the project management of an implementation in Japan brought "a great lifestyle", but a distinct shift in the way things were done.

"In London I got used to a lot of conversion and debate about how a solution should be handled, but for the first few weeks in Japan, attempts at discussion were met with silence - hardly the best use of time.

"It was a cultural thing; people do not venture opinions above and beyond those of people ahead of them, and to gainsay people in public at the risk of causing a loss of face is not desirable."

The next step up was to become IS manager for Unilever's South-east Asian operations, based in Djakarta, again managing some major global solution implementations and regional development in a "traditional distribution" environment where the supply chain extended beyond the "modern" supermarket end-point:

Distribution filtered out to thousands of small shopkeepers and kiosks, down to street vendors "with a basket on a bike".

But bigger challenges were waiting for her in Australia in 1995 where Unilever operated four business units producing foodstuffs, ice cream, home and personal care products, and margarines. Each unit had its own ERP platform.

After becoming e-business manager in 1998 ("we were doing e-business long before it was called that") and developing structures for the company's Australasian operations, and a year off for maternity leave, she became CIO and set about "sorting the place out".

IT for the four companies "had become a complete nightmare but no one had for whatever reasons been able to fix it. We needed to consolidate to create a foundation for moving forward".

Three of the units were on the same platform with the fourth on another, and it was run by a series of interfaces - "it was just spaghetti". Under a project called "Earthquake" the four were integrated on an IBM WebSphere platform complemented by BPCS for ERP and PeopleSoft for HR.

While Unilever has had close e-business connections with Coles and Woolworths for many years, although mainly for purchase orders and smaller documents, the revised architecture has readied Unilever for the next stage in its e-business evolution.

"Coles and Woolies have extensive plans to automate a number of their processes and we are more than willing to work with them to our mutual benefit. We already have advanced document exchange with our third-party suppliers and warehouses."

Her IT planning stretches out three to five years with new technologies under constant review, although RFID, while "on the radar" is not a priority. "There's a lot of noise and hype surrounding it and we'll look more closely at it when there's an appropriate implementation based on an acceptable standard."

She has a full-time IT staff of 60 supplemented with about 20 contractors working on technologies like .Net, and students from the University of Technology in Sydney under a sponsored program to give IT undergrads workplace experience.

"It's a good program under which students spend six months at a company like ours at the end of their first year, and another six months at another at the start of their third year. It gives high quality students, selected under a rigorous process, a springboard into jobs when they graduate.

"We've only been in the program for two years but I appreciate its value having been through something like it myself."

Students are set some testing tasks, for example being part of a Siebel implementation team and are required to make a presentation to the IT department at the end of their stint.

Her office at Unilever's North Rocks plant in Sydney's northwest is the typically functional CIO haven, neat and sparse with the obligatory whiteboard and little else except a small framed picture of her five-year-old daughter, and a large pictorial calendar depicting WW1 troops gathered in a trench on the Western Front.

"I don't really know why, but I have a fascination with the Great War and have read the classical books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Robert Graves, [Booker Prize-winner] Pat Barker's trilogy including The Ghost Road and the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon."

Perhaps its history offers an indication of what can happen when planning goes awry . . .