When your supply chain serves over 400 distributors and retailers and manages thousands of SKUs daily, inefficiency isn’t just costly, it’s contagious. For Unilever, one of the world’s largest CPG leaders, daily fulfillment operations involved multiple manual tools and systems that required constant planner attention.

So the company has partnered with Solvoyo to utilize an integrated AI platform and automate fulfillment decisions across its 20+ brands. The final result is 95%+ of decisions planned and executed with no planner intervention which boosts planner productivity multiple folds.

20+ Brands and 10,000+ Daily Orders Required a Scalable, Autonomous Platform

The Customer Service team faced growing operational strain managing over 10,000 daily orders across 20+ brands. With each customer requiring unique delivery and packaging constraints, planners spent countless hours coordinating across planning, warehouse, and logistics teams, often reactively. This often resulted in stock imbalances, early stockouts, excess inventory, and rising working capital.

Unilever Partnered with Solvoyo for Fulfillment Planning

Partnering with Solvoyo, Unilever has reimagined fulfillment as a digital, data-driven process. The approach blends analytics, optimization, and intuitive design, giving planners a single intelligent platform for proactive decision-making.

The transformation began with the digitization step, building seamless data integration that connects SAP and 3rd party data integration systems on a unified platform, providing a real-time view of demand, supply, production, and warehouse stock. This eliminated the silos that had previously slowed coordination.

Next came the intelligence step, which provides automated forecasts to assess demand over the next weeks and months. Finally, the decision automation step, utilizing advanced optimization modeling, is designed to maximize truck utilization (both weight and volume) while considering customer priorities and business constraints. The model concurrently optimizes for objectives such as service levels, inventory targets, and transportation efficiency, all within minutes.

To ensure planners have flexibility, the system includes dynamic scenario selection, allowing teams to run fulfillment models with different objectives (e.g., cost, service, balance) across the month. A built-in interface enables easy constraint management, letting users modify allocation limits or coverage targets for specific SKUs directly from the screen.

The Fulfillment Engine Generates Plans within Minutes

Unilever’s new fulfillment model seamlessly pulls critical data from SAP and 3rd party data integration systems, including usable warehouse inventory, customer orders and prioritization, and weekly frozen production plans. It combines this with Solvoyo-generated intelligence, such as:

• Daily Demand Forecasts: Forward-looking visibility over a full year.
• Allocation Limits: Maximum SKU quantities per planning period.
• Target Levels: Desired stock coverage for each distributor channel.

Within just 3–5 minutes, the system generates optimal fulfillment plans for over 10,000 daily orders, recommending what to allocate, how much to deliver, and where to ship.

Each plan includes:

• Quantities ready to ship today
• Stock allocated for future deliveries
• Projected future deliveries aligned with planned production and forecasted demand

Planners can visualize future allocations, fine-tune decisions by SKU, customer, or channel, and instantly sync approved delivery suggestions back to SAP for execution, creating a frictionless, end-to-end fulfillment workflow.

Unilever Plans 95% of Fulfillment Decisions with No Human Touch

Unilever now automates 95%+ of fulfillment plans without human touch, dramatically reducing manual effort, improving service levels, and enabling the team to respond faster to demand fluctuations, turning a complex daily challenge into a smooth, predictable, and high-performing operation.

• The company has achieved 95%+ plan decision automation with no planner intervention, managing its vast network with a small team
• The need for manual coordination and exception management has dramatically reduced
• Service levels increased through proactive, data-driven decisions
• Response time to demand variability is faster, even under high complexity

What Does this Mean for You?

Unilever’s journey shows that fulfillment excellence is not about working harder; it’s about utilizing AI and automation effectively. By connecting planning, optimization, and execution through intelligent automation, CPG companies can transform fulfillment from a daily manual headache into a strategic differentiator.

Start your decision automation journey with us.