Consumer Goods: Unilever, Kimberly Clark, KC -- Jumping Into AI

Used to analyze what Unilever was doing in applications of Advanced tech.  Here related: 

How Unilever Expedites Product Innovation With AI, Automation, and Robots

04/21/2023 By Liz Dominguez Managing Editor,   in Consumergoods

Robots are having a heavy hand in product innovation at Unilever, thanks in large part to the efforts being implemented at the company’s Materials Innovation Factory (MIF) in Liverpool, according to a recent blog post. 

These innovations are having a global impact, influencing product discovery, research, and manufacturing in not just the U.K., but across the sea in the U.S. as well. There’s three special “ladies” to thank, per Unilever, and they’re named Ariana, Shirley, and Gwen. 

These three robots are working alongside 250 R&D experts at Unilever’s 120,000-square-foot facility to help develop science-backed products through the power of automation. 

According to Unilever, MIF has the highest concentration of robots doing material chemistry in the world, and each machine is designed to crunch “colossal amounts of data and maintain consistency across samples and testing.”

The company makes it clear, however, that it isn’t looking to replace human efforts; it’s merely freeing up time by reducing time-consuming, repetitive jobs so that experts can focus on invention and exploration.

“The MIF’s purpose is to create a community of talented future research leaders, exchanging ideas with academic colleagues and accelerating the discovery process,” said Unilever. “Our partnership here allows us to tap into the best minds and resources in robotics, which strengthens our insights and capabilities to power next-level innovation, scientific discovery, and produce products with superior performance.”

Will robot management be a job of the future? CGT thinks so. Find out more.

Meet the Robots

Beauty bot Ariana is preparing mass amounts of hair fiber samples in mere seconds in order to create hair products for Unilever’s brands, including Dove’s Intensive Repair line. Using a patented Fiber Repair Actives technology, Unilever can help consumers reconstruct inner hair fibers to reduce breakage and repair from within the hair strand. 

Shirley

This robot is helping to expedite and mimic the process of hair washing and rising, running through 120 samples of hair every 24 hours. Shirley can rise, detangle, and blow dry hair, speeding up the analysis process so researchers can create accurate haircare product formulas, such as for the TRESemmé’s Colour Radiance Booste product line. The range of products uses tech that Shirley helped invent in order to better protect hair surfaces and keep color vibrant longer within hair fibers.

Gwen 

Robot Gwen plays an important role in the sensory aspect of products, generating, measuring, and analyzing foam. As Unilever uses foam in many of its products to deliver ingredients, the company said it’s important it can accurately attribute performance related to the amount, quality, and type of bubbles and froth. 

“Understanding its physical, chemical and consumer relevance is important in product development,” said the company. 

The Role of AI and Data

Along with robotics, the company has also heavily invested in artificial intelligence, an advance that it said allows Unilever to parse through “vast quantities of data in record time” in order to make discoveries and create new formulas. 

For example, for the company’s Hourglass Confession Red Zero lipstick, Unilever used AI to quickly analyze different color combinations before landing on a specific pigment — a research process that would normally take millions of physical experiments to replicate. 

The company has filed more than 200 patents between 2022 and 2022 using this type of invaluable data, investing more than 100 million euro into its innovation hub in order to benefit from these types of technologies.

“We are nothing without our science-backed products,” said Samantha Samaras, head of science and technology, Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing and Personal Care, in a statement.

Unilever’s relationship with data-powered innovation only grows stronger, as showcased by the company’s commitment to improve digital organization and data warehousing across the enterprise by moving entirely to the cloud. 

Under the new leadership of CEO Hein Schumacher, who has a long track record of transforming supply chains with sustainable and automated technology, it’s expected that Unilever will continue on this path.

An Industry-Wide Effort?

Automation and artificial intelligence go hand-in-hand, and a growing number of consumer goods companies are implementing both as they scale their supply chain transformations, focusing on either end-to-end reinvention or putting special emphasis on a particular area. 

One such area? According to IDC’s Futurescape report, by 2023, 50% of all supply chain forecasts will be automated through the use of artificial Intelligence.

Read more: Building the Supply Chain of the Future: 5 Consumer Goods Companies Investing in Innovative Approaches

Other areas of focus include supply chain workforce, merchandising, fulfillment, and more. 

Take, for example, Kimberly-Clark, which is leveraging an AI-enabled tool to automate the distribution planning and deployment process, as well as improve scheduling. Additionally, Mondelez International chief sales and marketing officer Martin Renaud said earlier this year that more than 1 million stores have access to its automated intelligence-enabled “suggested other” function, which has so far freed up representatives to engage 45% of more time in robust selling vs. administrative tasks. 

More Robotics News

ChatGPT: Do These Transformative Consumer Goods Use Cases Outweigh Concerns?

In this edited webinar transcript, Albert Guffanti, VP of the Retail Technology Group at Ensemble IQ, leads a discussion on the topic of generative AI, touching on use cases and reasons why the consumer goods industry should embrace the tech.

ChatGPT

Henkel To Shift Entire Digital Infrastructure to the Cloud

Henkel has announced plans to migrate fully to the cloud over the upcoming months.

Coty Launches Internal Upskilling Metaverse for Global Workforce

Beauty company Coty has stepped into the metaverse, launching a virtual campus designed to upskill its global workforce.  ....'

Smarter Bathrooms on the Supply Chain

A look at making consumer demand points made more intelligent.  An intelligent endpoint in the supply chain.   Here work by IBM and Kimberbly Clark.  In Readwrite:

" ... Kimberly-Clark Professional’s new Intelligent Restroom app was built using IBM Bluemix development platform and through the use of the IBM Internet of Things Foundation service, facilities managers collect data and alerts from sensors integrated into restroom amenities, from soap dispensers to air fresheners, as well as non-amenities like entrance doors. All the data is managed and monitored through a central dashboard that can be viewed on desktops or mobile devices remotely. ... " 

New Marketing Machinery at Kimberly Clark

In Consumer Goods Technology:

' ... To become effective marketers in a digital world, organizations must chart a new course using new marketing machinery. Technology lies at the heart of this new machine, and IT is grinding the gears, developing and delivering solutions that are tailored to the Marketing organization’s immediate and long-term needs.

In this exclusive interview, Jennifer Sepull, chief information officer and vice president, IT Services (ITS), and Mukund Kaushik, vice president of the newly-formed IT Services, Global Marketing unit, reveal how Kimberly-Clark Corporation is redefining the rules of collaboration between Marketing and IT to succeed in a world where the term digital marketing has evolved into “marketing in a digital world.”   .. ' 

Kimberly-Clark and Advanced Technologies

Piece in Mediapost about how CPG companies are looking at advanced technologies.   Some curious examples.

" ... Many brand marketers make the annual pilgrimage to CES in search of the next big thing. On Monday, a team from CPG giant Kimberly-Clark and its agency Mindshare saw what could well be the next smallest thing -- a promising new technology that operates at the molecular level, but has the potential to alter the entire world of consumer marketing.

“This is a relatively medium fat cheese,” Damian Goldring told the K-C team watching as he demonstrated SCiO, a handheld sensor capable of analyzing any form of physical matter simply by scanning it -- in this case, a platter of cheeses he had just purchased at a local supermarket here. ... " 

Kimberly Clark Tracks Coupons Directly

Kimberly-Clark Gets Serious With Its Digital-Coupon Tracking
Marketer Building Its Own Deal Database and CRM Programs

Packaged-goods marketers have been shifting to digital coupons from paper for years, but most of those electronic deals aren't individually coded. That's a big miss for marketers because the coupons can't be used to build customer-relationship-management programs that track how people use and share deals. .... " 

Kimberly Clark : More Specialists Needed

KC says more marketing specialists needed.  In particular technological skill that can determine what is possible with new data.

" .... As companies turn to digital marketing to build their brands, they will need marketing specialists that have a combination of marketing, technological and creative skills, according to Mayur Gupta, global head of marketing technology at Kimberly-Clark. Consumers have more of a voice than ever before on digital platforms, and marketers need to respond to what they say about their brand. "It’s the modern consumer who is omnipresent and is pretty much everywhere," Gupta said ... " 

Eye Tracking in the Aisle

In the WSJ:  Continued advanced usage of eye tracking to understand the shopping consumer.    Some very interesting detail is included in this article.   " ....  companies likeProcter & Gamble Co.,Unilever PLC and Kimberly-Clark are combining three-dimensional computer simulations of product designs and store layouts with eye-tracking technology. And that, in turn, is helping them roll out new products faster and come up with designs and shelf layouts that boost sales ... "

RFID: The Kimberly-Clark Experience

Good article on the current state of RFID and work ongoing at Kimberley-Clark, Best Buy, DHL and Wal-Mart. Some details on KC's work with display tracking, an example of RFID tagging focused to clear business problems.

" ... One Wal-Mart supplier, consumer goods company Kimberly-Clark, is about to expand to more products a pilot that used RFID to monitor promotions of its Depend adult diapers. The company created fully stocked promotional displays of Depend and put RFID tags on the displays before shipping them to Wal-Mart and Target, another RFID pioneer. Using software OATSystems developed with Kimberly-Clark's input--and which the vendor began selling last week--the consumer goods company could see on a color-coded dashboard how many stores received the product in the stockroom and how many put it on the store floor.

That setup helps Kimberly-Clark know if the displays are on the floor at the same time its ads run. "We back up promotion displays with TV advertising, so you spend a lot of money trying to get consumer awareness of them," says Mike O'Shea, director of corporate AutoID/RFID strategies. The feedback wasn't good: Kimberly-Clark learned that just 56% of stores executed the promotion on time, and those that were late reported lower sales. It used the information to work with the retailers and has since been able to increase on-time execution of Depend store promotions to 75%.

It's these types of focused applications that will work for RFID, O'Shea says. Although no one was naming names, last week's RFID World conference was rife with talk of Wal-Mart suppliers that have spent considerable money on RFID, are collecting loads of data, yet haven't figured out what to do with it. "They got caught up in the hype of the technology and lost focus," says O'Shea. "You will get those wins, and we've proved that." ...."