Case Study: Unilever achieves up to 4% cost-of-goods savings with River Logic

This Top-Ranked Global Consumer Goods Company Saves Up to 4% in Cost of Goods in Just Months with River Logic

UPFIELD (formerly Unilever’s Baking, Cooking & Spreads division, “BCS”) was struggling with highly complex capacity planning and production-allocation problems despite extensive SAP and supply-chain tooling. Planners were manually encoding rules to balance capacity, throughput, labor, inventory and costs across dozens of lines and nine factories, facing roughly a million possible scenarios and unable to answer the core question of optimal SKU-level monthly production. The business selected River Logic as its optimization and prescriptive-analytics vendor to address these gaps.

River Logic deployed its Platform-based Capacity Planning and Production Allocation solution (Intelligent Modelling) to represent procurement, logistics, manufacturing, BOMs and full factory financials, enabling web-based scenario analysis and embedded PowerBI reporting. The solution delivered measurable impact: up to 4% savings in cost of goods within months, a shift from annual to rolling 12-month planning, and a reduction in planning time from months to 1–2 days, dramatically improving decision quality and agility. River Logic’s model-based optimization allowed rapid what-if analysis and better strategic/tactical decisions across the network.

Unilever