Inspiring teamwork to fund brand growth

Consumer Package Goods Innovation

Unilever

“The Boiling Point™ process created real involvement and high comittment. We achieved a strong program with clear, quick wins on the table”.

Geert van Iwaarden, Director of Finance, Unilever

To help Unilever find new funds to drive profitable growth we guided cross-functional teams in both North America and across Latin America through a 6-week margin improvement process. Unilever had to focus on identifying short-term savings and each project team had to deliver at least $25MM to fund their team's immediate growth initiatives.

Story

The core challenge for Unilever North America and Latin America was to identify practical, short-term margin improvement initiatives so that the Unilever teams could re-invest those savings immediately back into their marketing efforts to drive business growth. This project required alignment and collaboration across many different functional silos within the company including departments that rarely, if ever, had worked together in the past.

Solution

We partnered with Unilever and created cross-functional teams, including sales and supply chain staff, in Chicago, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Each of these 3 teams was led through our 6-week Boiling Point™ on-site and online process that first identified high opportunity areas for cost savings and then developed specific saving initiatives in each of the select opportunity areas of Unilever's supply chain.

Results

Each Unilever team fully embraced their challenge and demonstrated their full commitment by delivering short-term cost savings initiatives which exceeded $25MM per team.