Customer collaboration and Kaizen strengthen Unilever’s supply chain with Amazon

E-commerce continues to be essential to our plans for growth, and when it comes to Unilever’s e-commerce retailers, Amazon is one of our most valued. We’ve been working to ensure our products are readily available on Amazon.com, making it easier for our customers to find and enjoy them through the convenience of Amazon’s online store.

To achieve this, we have worked hard to strengthen relationships between Unilever and Amazon’s worldwide supply chain teams, and streamline operations for shipping Unilever products to Amazon fulfilment centres.

“Maintaining strong relationships with retailers like Amazon, who built new technology-enabled business models to serve changing customer habits, is vital to ensure our brands are well presented to our consumers and available for purchase at all times,” explains Unilever Global Digital Commerce Customer Supply Chain Director Mark Sumner.

Unique approach to improving performance on e-commerce

Both Unilever and Amazon are well regarded across e-commerce for their world-class supply chains, having been recognised as two of only four Supply Chain Masters in the prestigious Gartner rankings for sustained supply chain performance and commitment to supply chain excellence.

But while Unilever has been in the business of selling consumer goods for over a century, e-commerce demands a very different approach compared to traditional brick and mortar retail.

With Amazon, the quantities and range of stock required at any one time are vast, there is a greater emphasis on fast delivery, and the model is completely digital. So Unilever has been thinking differently. And we turned to a Japanese problem-solving methodology, known as Kaizen , to guide our work together.

Building a future-fit supply chain

Typically used in a manufacturing environment, Kaizen is an approach designed to achieve continuous improvement by letting go of conventional assumptions and the status quo. Since 2022, teams from Unilever have been joining teams from Amazon to carry out Kaizen workshops.

In practice, that means Unilever and Amazon teams worldwide are coming together in offices, warehouses and fulfilment centres to analyse the end-to-end supply chain processes from a new angle.

Teams collaborate to map the end-to-end supply chain pain points and use data to reduce waste and inefficiency in our order-to-fulfilment operations. We align on key actions to streamline and integrate our operations more closely, and establish a stronger relationship between our respective teams locally. The Kaizen workstream has brought together over 150 supply chain and business leaders from Unilever and Amazon across six global regions, with very positive results.

“To date, we’ve carried out Kaizen workshops with Amazon in Australia, Brazil, Europe, Egypt, India and the US. Though a series of very open, productive conversations and actions we have improved 15 key performance indicators and solved over 100 pain points since we started this programme in July 2022,” says Mark.

For example, our 2022 Kaizen in Australia drove a 40% reduction in Unilever’s out-of-stock rate on Amazon. In 2023, our Kaizen in Egypt drove an incremental 20% improvement in Unilever’s order acceptance rate. And in 2024, our Kaizen in India led to a 35% increase in Unilever’s order fill rate and a 55% reduction in defects delivering Unilever products to Amazon fulfilment centres.

“Every Kaizen workshop and follow-up has had beneficial impacts – big and small. One major change was Unilever creating a new internal dashboard that allows us to share supply chain performance data across global Unilever teams. This has improved our demand planning and in-stock availability for Amazon customers and achieved greater alignment on our supply chain strategy,” adds Mark.

“Smaller shifts have made a big impact too, such as changing the shipping packaging on some products, so that Amazon don’t need to re-pack them before sending to shoppers. They just use our box and add an address label. It all adds up to a stronger, future-fit supply chain.”