Case Study: Unilever achieves IT cost transparency and millions in savings in 15 months with Apptio

Transparency, accountability, and millions saved in just 15 months at Unilever

Unilever, the global consumer goods giant with more than 400 brands, €52.7B in revenue and 169,000 employees, faced a major IT challenge: a centralized, legacy-driven cost model that left most technology spending as a “black box.” The company could not accurately attribute infrastructure and application costs to services or business units, resulting in oversized legacy amortizations, thousands of overlapping services and hundreds of low-value projects—undermining efficiency and the company’s margin goals.

Unilever implemented Technology Business Management (TBM) with Apptio and moved to a platform-based, customer-centric IT model, cleaning up its CMDB, automating discovery and introducing chargeback and benchmarking. Within 15 months this delivered measurable gains: a €15M recovery in an India pilot, a projected €50M in cloud savings, reduction of services from 4,000 to 2,000 and projects from 650 to about 33 focused areas, IT costs moved from well above benchmarks to within 10%, cost visibility rose from ~20% to ~80%, over 95% server discovery and TCO visibility for more than 70% of services.

Unilever

Gopalan Natarajan

Chief Financial Officer Global Business Services