Unilever’s Digital Manufacturing System: A Model for Future-Ready Supply Chains
Key Highlights
- Digital supply chains leverage AI, IoT, blockchain and digital twins to automate and optimize every stage, enabling real-time learning and adaptation.
- Unilever’s digital manufacturing system (UMS) has improved productivity, reduced waste, and increased supply chain reliability across over 75% of its factories.
- Resilience is now defined by faster sensing, decision-making and response capabilities, moving away from reliance on buffers to proactive, data-driven management.
- Scaling digital use cases like AI-driven planning and logistics has delivered tangible operational and sustainability benefits at global lighthouse sites.
- Effective digital supply chains require strong leadership, continuous talent upskilling, robust risk management and close collaboration with partners.
Digital supply chains are the new cornerstone of leading manufacturing, energy, retail and logistics organizations. Using Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR or Industry 4.0) technologies, these companies are increasingly digitalizing and strengthening existing supply chains to improve planning, agility, resilience and sustainability.
AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, digital twins and blockchain are just some of the innovations enabling profound change, and still more are emerging. Interconnected digital networks using such technologies aim to automate and optimize every stage of the supply chain while continuously learning and adapting to real-time conditions. By comparison, in traditional linear supply chains, each step depends on the preceding one and visibility and responsiveness to disruptions are lacking.
Well-designed and increasingly autonomous digital supply chains foster flexibility and resilience in the face of operational vulnerabilities. Common examples are weak suppliers, logistical bottlenecks, demand shifts, market volatility and natural disasters. But as with any new technology solution to business challenges, unique methods and talent are necessary to protect against risks and ensure reliability.
Fortunately, R&D, information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams have adaptability to new innovations in their job descriptions. Upskilling, reskilling, recruiting and engaging with third-party experts are management imperatives to mitigate fragilities in integration, cybersecurity, traceability and transparency, data integrity and more.
Additionally, best-practice supply chain management, digital or not, requires comprehensive risk management, contingency planning and close collaboration with supply chain and technology partners to protect against challenges and maintain business continuity.
Industry leader demonstrates digital supply chain success
Unilever is achieving highly beneficial results and attaining recognition for its ongoing supply chain transformation. The global rollout of its digitally enabled Unilever Manufacturing System (UMS), announced in April 2025, established a common digital backbone across factories, embedding AI, advanced analytics and connected execution into daily operations. UMS was developed collaboratively with supply chain, digital and technology expertise.
To date, eleven Unilever sites have been recognized as World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse sites, including three this year. Lighthouses are manufacturers demonstrating leadership in applying 4IR technologies at scale to drive step-change operational, sustainability and financial improvements.
Global Lighthouse Network recognition is contributing to surging interest in digitally transforming supply chains. The appeal is particularly widespread in organizations where digital commerce is a primary driver of growth. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) are a prime example, especially the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), which sell quickly at low prices, and factory-to-consumer (F2C) business models that eliminate the middlemen.
We invited Renato Miatello, chief product supply officer for Unilever Home Care, to reflect on his experience in driving resilience, digital transformation and competitive advantage in global supply operations. His candid insights on Unilever’s manufacturing system and supply chain digitalization, including how it changed the need and nature of resilience, are beneficial to anyone seeking greater clarity on cutting-edge technology and AI opportunities.
How did the Unilever Manufacturing System digital platform rollout strengthen supply chain performance and sustainability?
By converting site-level data into real-time, decision-ready insights that drive action, UMS has helped improve productivity, reduce waste and strengthen end-to-end supply chain reliability at scale. UMS is now live in more than 100 factories, covering over 75% of Unilever’s production capacity, helping sites increase equipment effectiveness, improve labor efficiency and unlock capacity.
These capabilities are demonstrated by Unilever’s World Economic Forum Global Lighthouse designations, which recognize not just innovation, but measurable gains in productivity, sustainability and operational resilience at scale.
The most recent examples include Hefei (China), where digitally enabled planning, fulfillment, and end-to-end connectivity underpin a factory-to-consumer model that cut lead times by 75% and significantly improved forecast accuracy. In Pondicherry (India), AI-driven process control boosted volume output by 25% while reducing defects, and in Gandhidham (India), smart digital tools enabled meaningful reductions in water use and emissions in a resource-constrained environment.
Together, these Lighthouse sites show how a scaled digital manufacturing platform can deliver performance, sustainability and resilience simultaneously, rather than forcing trade-offs between them.
How has the increasingly digital supply chain influenced resilience priorities for your CPG and FMCG operations, including digital commerce?
As d-commerce grows rapidly, from static buffers to the ability to sense, decide and respond faster across the value chain, digital supply chain capabilities allow Unilever to connect live demand signals directly to planning, production and fulfillment, enabling teams to act in near real time with greater confidence and precision. This is especially critical for d-commerce, where order profiles are smaller, faster and less predictable.
At sites like Hefei, AI-driven replenishment, fulfillment, and logistics optimization enable rapid responses to demand swings while maintaining service, cost discipline and scalability as volumes grow.
How is resilience being redefined in today’s complex and fast-moving modern supply chains?
Resilience is increasingly tested where complexity outpaces visibility, particularly in fast-moving, data-intensive environments such as social and direct-to-consumer commerce. In these contexts, fragmented systems, disconnected data and slower decision-making can quickly affect service levels, cost and availability.
As a result, resilience is being redefined from relying on buffers to enabling faster sensing, decision-making and response across the value chain. Integrated, data-led operations embed intelligence into daily decisions, supported by systems that can learn and adapt over time, with humans clearly in the loop.
Resilience also depends on having clear visibility of critical supply chain partners and treating disruption as a constant. Understanding key dependencies allows stronger controls, clearer response plans and faster recovery when issues arise.
What has Unilever done in practice to build resilience at scale?
Unilever has focused on scaling proven digital use cases with clear business outcomes, including AI-driven planning and process control, intelligent fulfillment and logistics optimization, and factory-to-consumer models that shorten lead times and increase responsiveness.
At World Economic Forum Lighthouse sites, these approaches have delivered tangible results, from forecast accuracy improvements and lead-time reductions at Hefei to higher output with lower defects at Pondicherry and significant labor-efficiency gains at Gandhidham. This demonstrates how resilience improves when digital capabilities are embedded into everyday operations and owned by frontline teams, rather than treated as one-off transformation initiatives.
Any final thoughts for our readers?
The strongest digital supply chains are built around data-to-action, with technology amplifying human expertise rather than replacing it. World Economic Forum Lighthouse recognition shows that resilience, sustainability and performance can be delivered together when advanced technologies are scaled with clear outcomes, robust operational ownership and leadership commitment.
About the Author
Sheila Kennedy
Contributor
Sheila Kennedy, MBA, CMRP, is a professional freelance writer and award-winning journalist specializing in industrial and technical topics. After working for 11 years in industrial information systems, she established Additive Communications in 2003 to leverage that knowledge and her affinity for research and writing.
Sheila has since produced thousands of client deliverables and hundreds of bylined articles, including more than 30 cover stories for industrial trade publications such as Plant Services, where she has been a contributing editor since 2004.
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