HUL's Shikhar user interface made seamless as popular social media apps

Apart from making the B2B app user-friendly for retailers, the FMCG major is looking to expand Samadhan, which cuts delivery time to just a day

Hindustan Unilever’s business-to-business (B2B) application – Shikhar, through which the country’s largest fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) major sees almost a third of its sales, has made the interface user friendly in a way to be as seamless as popular social media apps. 

Instead of stories, the app has brands, which it uses to encourage shopkeepers to buy items witnessing high demand from surrounding areas. Hindustan Unilever (HUL) has also tailored the top carousel to list the brands that the retailer orders the most. Additionally, the offers on the app differ from retailer to retailer as it is personalised, and it helps the retailer order products and see the margins he or she makes depending on the quantity of the order placed.

"We received internal user feedback asking us to offer an experience similar to popular social media apps, and we complied. It's about being able to dovetail those numbers of inputs and insights to be able to build it back into something like this," said Meenakshi Burra, chief data officer, HUL and vice-president — technology, data & analytics — Unilever South Asia.

HUL also leverages big events to keep its kiranawalas (small shopkeepers) engaged with the app. An example here is the Indian Premier League where HUL ran offers during the cricketing tournament by offering prizes/discounts to retailers and keeping them engaged with the app.

"We have built a best-in-class user experience on our Shikhar App based on our deep understanding of how the retailer operates. Features like gamification and multi-language support make it engaging and easy for the retailer to connect with HUL online," Burra said.

In order to be a highly digital and data driven organisation, the Unilever Operations (UniOps) team brings digital experiences for its consumers, customers, and its own operations through capabilities like Shikhar, Samadhan and the Agile Innovation Hub.

The maker of Lux soaps is looking to reduce the time to just one day between the orders being placed by the retailer and the delivery. The company has already started a pilot project in Chennai called Samadhan where it is working on reducing the timeline of deliveries to a day.

While the company is still testing its Samadhan project, it is looking to tap into the same to make better and faster deliveries by looking at different models.

"Samadhan, our highly automated distribution centre, is a key enabler to increase our speed of last-mile delivery. We have fine-tuned the model and will expand this capability to other metros going forward with a focus on driving faster and better delivery experience for our retailers," Burra said. She added that while the company is exploring large cities at the moment, it is something still being formulated, and HUL believes that it is important to drive next-day deliveries.

The company's Winning in Many Indias (WiMI) strategy, which it started in 2015, helped it gather data at a more granular level and launch products for specific regions based on tastes and preferences.

HUL shifted to looking at India in 16 clusters. "The Winning in Many Indias framework is core to HUL and how we drive our business. In the past, we used to have four branches, which we deaveraged into 16 consumer clusters. Data has played a big role in this transformation – our HUL Data Lake has granular and up-to-date data across all aspects of our business. Analytics products like Livewire and Jarvis leverage cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to provide granular and predictive insights to drive actions and decisions at the WiMI cluster level," Burra explained.

"We actually have data and the history that is available to us. Therefore we are able to forecast and drive assortment with our customers who are our retailers," she further added.

The consumer major is also actively looking at trends, especially in the skincare space, and examining ingredients which are trending to help the company come up with new products.

"At our Agile Innovation Hub, we leverage technology and AI to actively scan social media and other digital channels for trending ingredients and formats, which helps our category and brand teams bring product innovations faster into the market," Burra said.

High Hopes

• The company sees almost a third of its revenue coming from Shikhar
• Samadhan remains in its testing phase
• Eyes potential to optimise deliveries by exploring diverse models
• FMCG major analysing demand across India through 16 clusters