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AI is advancing our business in many areas, from data-driven insights for marketing right through to digital product development in our labs. It’s making a big impact in manufacturing too, increasing productivity, enhancing resilience and antifragility, reducing waste, improving resource planning – and much more.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network recognises the most digitally advanced factories around the world. To meet the criteria, sites must show how they’re using Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies such as AI, factory automation, cloud computing and the internet of things to transform their ways of working, and drive financial, operational and sustainability improvements.
At our Tinsukia site in India, 4IR technology runs almost every process, with more than 50 initiatives currently in place across the end-to-end supply chain. It’s this progressive approach that’s led to Tinsukia becoming the eighth Unilever factory to earn Lighthouse recognition.
Our e-commerce business is growing fast, and to meet the increasing demand for quick delivery, we need to get our products made, shipped and ready for sale at a rapid pace.
At Tinsukia, we’ve implemented an AI-powered vision system which maps product features and identifies anomalies in real time, resulting in rapid one-click changeovers when a machine or line is switched from manufacturing one product to another. The move has made changeover times 85% faster.
Tinsukia uses generative AI-enabled consumer insights to improve product quality swiftly. Using large language models, the site has achieved 97% accuracy in analysing consumer feedback and turning it into actions, faster than ever before.
This has helped the factory achieve a 73% improvement in customer satisfaction scores, and a 21% improvement in reducing manufacturing defects.
A new AI-powered workforce allocation tool has helped to improve labour productivity at Tinsukia by almost 400%.
Developed in-house, the tool dynamically allocates the right people to high-priority production lines based on their skills and experience. It also identifies skills gaps and provides targeted training to upskill employees where needed.
Across Unilever, we’re aiming to reduce virgin plastic by 40% by 2028. AI is helping support that goal at the factory.
Teams at Tinsukia have introduced an AI-enabled digital twin approach which is helping us trial more sustainable packaging options at pace and incorporate more recycled content into our packaging.
By creating a digital replica of the site online, we can simulate, test and monitor operations virtually before implementing the most successful options in the real world.
So far, this has resulted in a 21% reduction in virgin plastic used in our packaging at the site. We’ve also cut the time it takes to run sustainable packaging trials by 84%, increasing the number of trials from two per year in 2019 to 30 in 2023.
More than 5.4 billion units a year are manufactured at Tinsukia, for brands including Dove, Vaseline and Pond’s. In fact, it has the largest manufacturing capacity of all our Beauty & Wellbeing factories in South Asia.
The site has introduced an AI-enabled digital planning ecosystem for ultra-rapid e-commerce delivery, which means we can now analyse more than 10,000 product combinations using over 300 features, acting on signals to ensure that production supply for these Unilever Power Brands meets real-time demand.
As a result, the site has been able to achieve a 92% reduction in the frozen period (the time it takes for production line schedules to be planned and re-set) from 14 days to one, significantly improving our speed to market and market responsiveness.
Our ability to predict consumer demand has improved by 35% and our finished goods inventory has reduced by 16%, allowing us to replenish stocks more efficiently and serve consumers faster.
“Tinsukia is the third site in India and in our Beauty & Wellbeing business to achieve WEF’s Lighthouse recognition. Its digital transformation is a powerful example of how we’re scaling AI across our supply chain to accelerate growth for our business now and into the future.
This is a remarkable testament to how humans and machines work together in manufacturing to accelerate a future-fit lean and agile supply chain,” says Biswaranjan Sen, Beauty & Wellbeing Chief Product Supply Officer.
“We’re pleased that technology has not only had a positive impact on our business, it’s also benefited our employees and local community,” says Kunwar-Apoorva Singh, Factory Leader at Tinsukia.
“Our digital factory transformation has created jobs and opportunities around this remote location, including the launch of a digital braille lab to create an inclusive pool of skilled local professionals. In collaboration with our tech partners, we’ve extensively upskilled our employees.
We’re supporting our shopfloor engineers to become digital innovators and training a new cohort of digital line leaders with 23% of our workforce already redeployed to lead digital transformation in the factory,” he adds.
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