Technology Associates implements Distribution Management system and provides Outsourcing services at Unilever East Africa.

Unilever East Africa is the regional subsidiary of the global FMCG giant and manages their operations across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia as well as regional markets in East & Central Africa. Using global standards across their IT platform, the group manages their manufacturing, sales, distribution and reporting through an array of applications such as Sun, Maximo, MFGpro among others.

The infrastructure at their Nairobi, Industrial Area offices is a sophisticated, state-of-the art gigabit LAN that we built a few years ago. HP, Cisco and Microsoft are the platform standards across the group’s regional offices. Needless to say, uptime of their IT infrastructure is mandatory for the smooth operations of the business. We have had a great business experience with Unilever East Africa, right from our first engagement contracted to implement a region-wide distribution management system using the Tally ees system. Having significantly revamped their data network, server clusters and desktops, we have been awarded a stringently evaluated contract for outsourced services since 2002.

Our team of onsite engineers, man the Unilever Kenya helpdesk fulltime. The contract stringently measures SLA deliveries and imposes severe penalties for deviations from pre-set SLA commitments.  The contract is re-tendered annually. We are a proud partner to Unilever’s business and will continue to cherish this long-standing relationship well into the future.

In an earlier engagement in 2000, we implemented one of the most prestigious distribution management systems at Unilever East Africa using Tally eis. Unilever were consolidating their distribution channels and were closing their Mombasa (Western Kenya) and Kisumu (Eastern Kenya) warehouses by bringing in centralization of their inventory control and distribution. It was paramount therefore that Unilever found an effective way of empowering their 90 distributors across the country to manage stock holding and beat sales management in as effective a manner. By customizing Tally eis in collaboration with TallySolutions India, we implemented Tally at all 90 distributors country-wide. Unilever were able to monitor inventory held at every distributor while also acquiring daily sales report beat-wise, region-wise, distributor-wise and retailer-wise across a host of other key inventory MIS reports. This information combined intrinsically with their manufacturing systems at the Nairobi plant and offered overall efficiency in their inventory and stock costings and control. This initiative was tremendously successful and was to be implemented within Unilever’s Asia pacific operations going forward. Technology Associates Kenya were awarded the best corporate solutions award by HP-Compaq in recognition of this project.