Unilever
A food availability case
Unilever, a renowned global consumer goods company, is constantly innovating its food products to stay in sync with evolving factors. However, Unilever faces a significant hurdle in this journey as its product developers currently reformulate products one by one, which can be quite time-consuming. To enhance efficiency, Unilever is actively working on a solution that integrates seamlessly with an existing internal tool. This innovative tool aims to empower product developers by enabling them to perform portfolio optimization more efficiently, ultimately streamlining the reformulation process.
The Challenge
Unilever, a global consumer goods company, reformulates food products to adapt to changing factors. The reformulation process becomes a challenge for Unilever because product developers reformulate sequentially for each product. To streamline this process, Unilever aims to develop a solution which will connect with an existing internal tool. This new proposed tool will enable product developers to perform portfolio optimization.
What the EngD trainee did
To build the Master Optimization Tool, trainee Ghoziyah Rachman started by understanding how the recipes were currently updated and what data was involved. She also looked at the tools Unilever already used. Then, she designed a system to handle the data coming in and going out of the existing tools. She made it easy to interact with these tools. Along the way, she got feedback from different people, including those who would use the tool. She also created a visual display for the updated recipes.
The result
The Master Optimization Tool now has five parts:
- Portfolio Optimization: This gets files ready and organizes recipes based on what users need;
- Target Function Setting: This lets users set goals for updating recipes;
- API Calling: This uses a simulation to calculate recipe properties and then updates them;
- Visualization: This shows the recipes in a clear way;
- Data Management: This manages how we save and get the updated recipes.
