Unilever
Berkeley Partnership LLP, The, 2009
Delivering Global Finance Transformation at Unilever
Summary
Between 2007 and 2009, Berkeley successfully led the turn-around and delivery of a critical financial transformation programme at Unilever, spanning over 100 countries and more than 600 group companies. This large-scale programme included the most complex implementation of the SAP Business Consolidation System (SAP BCS) to date, globally.
Unilever is a major global player in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), responsible for numerous household brands from Persil to Pot Noodle. It is also one of the world’s most diverse companies, with 174,000 employees in over 100 countries. Gathering and consolidating high quality, timely financial information across such a huge, diverse, and dispersed business is a major challenge.
Unilever’s global financial information systems were old and insufficiently flexible to support business changes. Unilever also wanted to streamline their financial reporting by consolidating the group financial results using data directly from the source ledgers in each of their 600+ companies around the world – a huge business change. Both these factors were driving the need to transform their global financial information processes.
A programme was mobilised in 2006 to address these points, but it quickly became clear that the scale of challenge was much greater than first envisaged. Unilever therefore approached Berkeley, whose experienced consultants quickly identified how to restructure the programme to get it back on track and encompass all the change necessary to achieve the desired business outcomes. Berkeley then continued to lead and manage the programme through to its successful conclusion.
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