[Music] [Ed Kennedy] Good afternoon. Hi, everyone. [Man] Hey. Wow, that was a very enlivened response for 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I'm very impressed. You must be passionate about B2B commerce. Yes. Anyone? I found my people. I found my people. I'm so glad that you chose this session. We have an incredible story to tell you about what Unilever has been up to with their distributive trade business. I'm so excited to rush through my slides, so I can turn it over to Prashaant and really get into the meat of the today's story. But for way of introduction, my name is Ed Kennedy. I work in Product Marketing for Adobe Commerce. I've spent over a decade implementing B2B ecommerce storefronts for a variety of brands, distributors, manufacturers globally. And we've got a great lineup of speakers here today. I'm going to show you a peek at the agenda and then we'll go from there. I'm just going to say a few words about B2B commerce in 2024, broadly, holistically, what it looks like here at Adobe. And then the majority of our time today is diving deep into this story of what Unilever has done and is doing in their distributive trade business. And I'll comeback at the end and share a few highlights for what you might consider as you move forward in your journey with Adobe.

So to set the stage, I think it's important to look at what B2B eCommerce is becoming globally in terms of online revenue. It's hard to get data, precise data. This is a forecast of what here at Adobe, we think the global B2B eCommerce market will become in 2027 and the corresponding growth rates for each major region. And really the dollar values aren't as meaningful until you start to really drive down into what it means in your business. And that's really what we're seeing on the frontlines with our customers. But whatever market you're doing business in, whatever markets you're considering doing business in, there is a B2B use case for retailers, for brands, manufacturers, and distributors. It's really just a matter of finding it. So to give us a little bit of context for who's in the room today, I'm actually going to ask immediately for audience participation number two. It's time to take out your phones and participate in our live poll. So if this works correctly, I'm going to be able to drag this over.

I'm going to be able to drag this over.

Maybe not. I have a QR code for you to scan.

There it is, and I'm going to hit present.

So if you scan that QR code or go to poll. ev/edkennedy, we just want to get an understanding of who's in the room with us today. And don't be too hard on yourself. If you've been doing B2B eCommerce for a little while, it's okay to say you're in the amateur, professional, or maybe even advanced category. But I just want to get a sense of where you say you are. So if you're getting in, I do see some live responses coming in right now. This is helpful for me and for all of our speakers today to understand kind of where each of you are in your journey. Okay. So we've got some movement here. It looks like a few are registering in the beginner category, but a good mix.

Some humble bragging going on in the room. Advanced B2B eCommerce is a known and supported function. That's a very generous statement. So it's just good to understand kind of where you're sitting in your overall B2B eCommerce journey. So thanks for participating in that poll just to give us a good sense of where you're standing. All right. So the last slide that I will go through is the six use cases that we see most common with our customers that are doing B2B eCommerce. Unilever today is going to be talking about their eB2B retailer and sales rep app, the combined experience that they've delivered. There are a couple of others that I commonly talk to our brand manufacturers, industrial manufacturers, and distributors about. The second one is adding commerce to an AEM implementation. That's a very common use case where we're adding transactional capabilities to an existing AEM implementation. The other, reaching new customers in new segments, is actually taking a white label off brand portal, and doing an SEO strategy to reach a long tail of customers. We've got customers now that aren't necessarily promoting and shouting from the rooftops that they're doing B2B eCommerce. They're starting to reach new customers they've never sold to before through a direct business rather than selling through their own main portal. The fourth is B2B or a B2C model where you've got dealers inside of your platform owning inventory and product, and you're enabling them to sell online. The fifth is the unifying globally of B2B and B2C use cases, and the last is marketplaces. These are the six themes that regularly come across my inbox and I'm being asked to consult and advise on. So you can kind of use this as a map and a landscape for if you want to find out more about where your B2B eCommerce journey can go. These are some of the paths to consider where our other customers are unlocking value. So that is all I will say about the context of B2B eCommerce. It's time to invite up Prashaant Huria. Prashaant, actually was here on Monday and went to our gala event where he was awarded the Experience Maker of the Year. So we are in fine company here. Please join me in welcoming Prashaant to the stage.

[Prashaant Huria] That's great. - Well done. - Thank you.

So before we start, hello, everybody. So my name is Prashaant Huria, and I'm the CTO and, Global Vice President for Distributive Trade, at Unilever. I don't know how many people know Unilever, so I thought maybe start with a little bit about how, what Unilever does and how we organize and the sort of products that we have that most of the people hopefully in the room would associate with. So through our five business groups, we distribute our products over 100 to 190 countries around the world. And every day, you could say that close to half of world's populations use our products at some stage. So we offer essentials like, Omo, Comfort.

You have Dove, Axe, Dermalogica.

We have Canor Soup, Hellman's Mayonnaise, which is really a big brand here in the US as well. Hollick's, major brand in India. And then we have ice cream, Ben, and Jerry's. And we have also quite a few other brands which are, I think quite big in the US, in the ice cream category.

So today I'm going to talk about how these products are getting in the hands of our customers and consumers like yourselves and how we are digitizing the entire value chain.

So digital is embedded across our business and from the way we innovate and design products, to how we engage customers and consumers, there are countless digitization opportunities that drive both growth as well as efficiencies. And one thing we must realize, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later in my presentation, is that, digital and sort of technology is not just the answer here. What's really important is that as wego around, we'll see that we need to start with the customers and understand them. What are their pain points? What are their challenges? And then be super sharp around, day-to-day, what are they facing, and then how do you create the value? You have to start with the customer. I'm not going to go into all of the different use cases because you'll probably lose patience listening to me by the end of it. But I'd like to talk about how we use digital to engage our customers and then transform how we get the products into their hands.

So when it comes to getting our products into the hands of our customers and consumers, we made broad strides, I would say, using digital to bemore effective.

And a few key themes aredigitizing in store tracking, in modern trade outlets, such as supermarkets, as you can see, using artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms to inform our portfolio design for different channels. We're also optimizing our investments in retail media. And then we're applying the latest digital technologies in our sort of discover, design, deploy, approach in our research and development function. But for today, I'm going to talk about how over the last few years, we've digitized 2.7 million retailers and bring everyone along our journey and sort of how we got there, where we are, and what our plans for the future.

So as mentioned earlier, we started our journey with the customer. This is basically a Kiranastore in India or Warung in Indonesia. These are the mom-and-pop stores. These are our customers in distributive trade, which is small and fragmented, mom-and-pop retailer, and there are millions of these, hundreds and thousands to millions in any one country. And they're often scattered across the country, more than sort of, more often than not in sort of rural areas as well. Of course, urban has a lot of concentration but also in the rural areas. They are the backbones of the communities and families providing daily necessities to those living in the proximity, while also providing sort of an additional income for their livelihoods, to support their families. And we serve these retailers through a network of distributors that we have, our business partners that resell Unilever products to these retailers. And they provide a range of services from, obviously, order capture, fulfillment, but also advisory services and so on. And we started our journey, by really thinking about the interactions that these retailers are having with those distributor sales reps on a daily basis, the challenges that they were facing, and then how the role of Unilever would be there to address these challenges within that, and finally, the value and benefits that could be created by all parties across the ecosystem. And when I talk about the value chain, that effectively is kind of broken into five big activity systems, which we call a grouping of processes. Demand capture, not just order capture, but really understanding, what they could be searching for, what they could be looking for. What's the total demand? And there are a lot of other inputs into that. Demand generation, then fulfilling that demand, demand fulfillment, then credits and payments, and finally, it's the digital adoption and the customer support itself. So as I go through the presentation, I would refer to some of these, activity systems, so to speak, and how we are trying to create value across those value systems, activity systems in the value chain.

So just a little bit about distributive trade because not everyone's familiar with what fragmented distributed trade was. I wasn't four years ago when I started to do this job and join Unilever and really understood this area.

DT or Distributive Trade is super critical for us and for a lot of other consumer product good companies and it drives a significant share of turnover in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. However, there are differences in the different models. And I'm only going to talk about two archetypes, but there are many other archetypes. In Latin America, the retailers are bigger and more mature, and the distributors are also bigger and more mature, more concentrated. And they are nonexclusive, meaning that they carry products from a broad range of consumer product good companies, not just, for example, in our case, not just Unilever, and they can command higher margins as a result. In Asia, the retailers are smaller and more fragmented, and the distributors tend to be exclusive, and they carry more often than not one CPG company's products at a time, and they command lower margins.

So what this means that if you're a consumer product good company like us, you have more influence over the distributors in Asia. And this has many implications in how you think about designing the technology solution across that value chain. Regardless, the challenges that these retailers face though, across the different markets and these archetypes are quite similar. So they're reliant on sales rep visiting them, once or twice a week.

And often, they only spend anywhere between 5 to 15 minutes per store. They worry about getting the best price and promotions.

When they're buying the product, so they can obviously maximize their margins. They are unsure of which products to buy, which products to stock effectively, and they cannot afford to carry slow moving products. So that is also an issue. And one of the biggest issues is the unreliable fulfillment, partly because of the infrastructure not being developed, but also because a lot of the systems are not integrated in those part of the world. And they often don't enjoy generous payment or credit terms that their modern super market peers do when they buy from Unilever. And they generally also have a hesitancy of getting credit in the first place.

So with all this in mind, we set to begin our digitization journey, and we've been on this journey for 10 years. Of course, some of the things have accelerated and I'll talk about that more than other parts. So back in 2013, way before, obviously, I was a Unilever, we began our initial investments in digitization and the focus was on digitizing our distributors' operations using platforms such as, well, now Accenture NewPage, and SAP's ISR industry retail solution. And we aim to streamline their manual processes, create the visibility into distributor operations. And at the sametime, we started to experiment with ecommerce.

And we had, for example, Hamara shop in India to My Shop, literal translation, which was the aim of which was to connect the shoppers to these small mom-and-pop stores, the kiranas in their area. And we then rode the way of COVID in 2020 and a bit later to accelerate our digitization. And we experimented with different models then.

On one hand, we had our enroute to market program, such as Shikhar in India, which has over one million outlets on-boarded today, which allows the retailers to place orders on the Unilever products and then have them delivered by the exclusive distributors. We also tried market places. We still have that in Compra Agora in Brazil and Compre Ahora in Argentina, where we would onboard CPG companies to offer the full branded CPG assortment for all outlets.

And regardless of the model, the laser focus was always around the retailer challenges, the customer challenges there and how each model could address them.

And today, we are Converge Jing on a single global platform, and we'll talk about it a bit later in having a platform or platforms approach, which is really essential. And this is where the power of platform actually comes in. We're all used toAdobe platform, Microsoft platform, but we created our own platform, which is made up of other platforms. So that platforms, of course, is fundamental to be able to deal with multiple business models.

And we're now converging to this global platform, which will roll out across all markets. We'll be starting with, focus seven markets, plus we have India, and Brazil. And so these top markets are very important. And our seven markets in Asia with Southeast Asia, so starting with Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and then South Asia, which is Bangladesh and Pakistan, and then also Turkey. And this platform is basically the culmination of all our learnings over the last 10 years.

And effectively this will transform distributive trade unlike any other company in the CPG sector has been able to do before. However, we're not the only ones who obviously disrupting this channel.

COVID not only accelerated that digitization journey but also brought in other B2B tech platforms, targeting the fragmented mom-and-popretailer, and supported by the large investments of VCs and private equity companies and other funds. Many of these platforms rapidly scaled up and acquired scale. So if you look at VinShop in Vietnam, for example, they have over 100,000 retailers. Grocerie in vPhilippines, and we have Accenture partner Philippines here. I'm sure you would know it's around 300,000 retailers. And so every country has some of these local techs first B2B players. And these platforms are providing full assortment range, aggressive promotions, as well as good retailer service in the form of fulfillment and credit, and that's disrupting our route to market as well as the role of the distributors. And a lot of other players are also coming in now. Of course, some of the VC and PE funding has dried up, so those aggressive promotions have taken a back seat.

But the models exist, and the companies exist.

And while the investment climate may have dampened in the last couple of years, the high NPS results published quarterly by BEES and AB InBevplatform in Latin America goes to show that these players remain ever relevant, even though the reach is low across the board. And we then decided last year to pivot into a model which effectively had inherent advantages already for Unilever with such a strong fulfillment logistics network and relationship with the retailers, and an established route to market already that we would actually build this platform and accelerate it even further. So that's what we've been doing. So our answer to that has been a global and future fit, technology stack, this platform of platforms that would improve the value proposition to the retailers, re-imagine the route to market through this omni-channel customer interaction, and leapfrog in certain areas through new technology interventions. So within this framework, you see the order capture and the demand generation are tailored to offer a seamless user experience and the demand fulfillment is engineered for optimization of costs and streamlining those business processes. So at the frontend, where retailers and sales rep will place orders, they'll deliver personalized promotions and offers as well as a streamlined ordering system to encourage retailer adoption and unassisted self-ordering.

And invisible to the retailer is then in the backend sort of the ERP for the distributors called distributor management system where we streamline, optimize, and automate the processes all the way from inventory management to stock allocation, to settlements. So our platform impacts daily lives of everyone in that ecosystem from the retailer to the distributor sales rep, to category managers to sales supervisors within Unilever and their partner ecosystem. So we also hope to drive a change in behavior which is the hardest thing in this journey and changing our retailers for being dependent on sales rep visits, through their relationships, independent users of, and become sort of the independent unassisted users of the app. I think that ismaking sure that they're able to order by themselves without assistance from others is, one of the hardest challenges to overcome. And changing our sales rep from being sort of ordertakers to really, becoming category and store advisers, uplifting their role, and allowing them to add more value to the ecosystem, I thinkis really big part of this change. And all of this is part of a broader transformation program that goes beyond just tech implementation because it's really here to drive incremental turnover and growth and deliver better service to the retailers as well as all the other stakeholders involved.

So let me give you a few examples to bring this to life a little bit. Our ordering journey for both retailers and sales rep was previously disconnected. So retailer had one app. The distributor sales rep had another app. There was no idea of what, as a retail retailer, I had put in the in my cart, no idea what coupons I had applied, no idea if my order was being processed or it was going to be rejected for some reason.

We've today merged those journeys across these personas and now my sales rep would know what items I've added to my cart. My sales rep would know that I have a cart but have yet to sort of check out and can provide the nudges to complete my order.

The sales rep would also know the status of my order as a as a retailer. And this visibility worked both ways, both for retailer as well as for the sales rep. And I think that's the beauty of it. And as a distributor, I would have struggled to have a clear inventory status, as simple as it might sound, not reflecting on the frontend, meaning that my sales rep would place an order and he or she doesn't know if that order will be fully fulfilled or partially fulfilled.

And at the end of the day, I would look at basically the orders when I realized that I have insufficient inventory to fulfill an order, which would be embarrassing and then I would need to call up the retailer. And it's happening across the board more often than not, that the orders then get canceled. That results intoloss in sales. So all of that has changed and is changing now and it's incredible how the order cancellations are coming down dramatically. When inventory is updated in real-time, near real-time, I should say, my sales rep can then place the orders only for the products that are available, which avoids basically the nasty experience of calling up and disappointing the customer at the end of the day. And the distributors, they can receive the orders. Every 15 minutes, they know what's being ordered. So they can then organize their own systems in the warehouses of how they want to do it. They don't have to wait till the end of the day. And these are just couple of examples how this is a step in the right direction towards delivering a better service, better value proposition to our customers with N Plus One delivery or N PlusTwo. Whatever the market is deciding to do in terms of what is our value preposition in that market towards the customers and the partners in that distributive trade channel.

So today, the new platform is live, as I said in few of our Southeast Asian markets, Vietnam, Thailand, and Philippines. The other markets are all coming live almost simultaneously this year.

So there's a huge amount of work. And we are already achieving marked success in the action standards that we are following. Growth, strong user feedback from both retailers as well as from the sales reps and the distributors, as well as happy sort of internal sales teams and customer development teams.

And I think what's really important is what have we learned so far, and I just wanted to share a few of those learnings. So the first learning is the importance of the product way, product led ways of working. Really, really important learning and I'll talk about that now. The second is the importance of constant iteration and sort of rapidly landing the innovations. Because as soon as you go live, already you have a lot of changes that you want to make because you are testing, learning, and pivoting very fast. So you need to do that very fast. Third is this importance of the platforms approach, which we decided to take by design.

A lot of start ups don't have to make that choice necessarily because they would build a bit, get the funding, build a bit more, and so on. And then eventually they'll decide to change parts of what they have to do. For us, I think the fastest route to market was actually building the platforms approach and in hindsight. And that was absolutely the right decision, it's paying out. So reflecting on the progress and learning. So talking about the first learning. Before the DGG program, basically there were different teams that would operate in silos, and they would regularly engage and work together for sure. But the business was or the other parts of the business other than the tech teams will almost be a, providing the technology and the process folks would be more like SMEs. We completely changed that. We decided to change that and build cross functional teams. We brought together teams of experts from business process, from user experience, technology, and we reorganized the teams altogether, not just temporary, but actually as a permanent organizational change. So we now have squad leaders for each of these activity systems and we have people who are in each of the squads with very clear OKRs. And they report into that squad for all intents and purposes. Of course, they come from the engineering team, and they come fromuser experience teams as well as from process experts. So no different to how a modern enterprise software company actually operates. And while this worked in defining the right products, features, and capabilities, after our first market launch, we quickly realized that we would need a single point of accountability to partner with the markets and they also needed someone. So we took a sort of a leaf from the customer success manager role in many technology and SaaS companies. And we instituted a market success lead role who would be responsible for the successful deployment in each of the markets. So it's like a T-shaped role. They understand what's happening across the squads and the entire platform and the products, but then they would really be focused on one market at a time.

And I thinkthey were selected from the squad leads to ensure the end-to-end accountability and ownership was there from design to deploy. So that's working beautifully. And this is a completely different way of working that Unilever has been used to in many markets. So I'm excited what this will continue to bring for us. Not the easiest model to work in through that change within a larger ecosystem, but this is the only model I think and the right model. I think this will work for what we are trying to do and to transform.

The second is involving the end-users early and constantly iterating and landing innovations rapidly. So we saw that. We focused our efforts on the most critical problems that plagued our customers and users.

And we went from a process of basically releasing features and functions. And, basically, our release plan was based quarterly even during this transformation, which has now moved into weeks. And we're hoping in many of the cases, it could also move into days. And we'll talk a little bit about what we had to do in order to get there a little bit later on. I think Parikshit will talk about some of the approaches. But making the most of a sales rep visit for the 5 to 10, to 15 minutes that they are in an outlet and the role that they play, making sure that we focus our efforts on understanding that, letting the supervisors know that they are performing on a daily basis, allowing them to make course correction a teach morning's briefing or even in the middle of the day, developing a customized loyalty solution, fit for a B2B context and I'll come to that in a minute and why that was so important for us. Helping our retailers grow by stocking the most relevant products that their peers, in the area are also stocking and getting that external data incorporated into our algorithms. And then to make this work we need to be crystal clear on the strategy of the program, the benefits of a program that it's expected to bring and clearly differentiates between the must have and nice to haves. Really, really hard to actually try and continuously do that because every market is our internal customer, so to speak. They're representing what the retailers in their markets require and the sales rep in their distribution network requires. So we have to try and see what is the 80% that will make the platform? No different to how an enterprise software company decides. And then sometimes the market will say, well, this is so important that I'm willing to pay for it. And then we have to decide, will this become a permanent feature and function of that product, or is it very specific to that market? And we've designed a, I would say a pretty mature way of actually now doing it. Not everyone's happy through that process, but they are getting used to it. That's the most important thing and now they understand that if they really need something, they need to think business case, which sometimes the sales and marketing folksare not operating in that way.

So I think I wanted to walk you through now some of these examples and deep dive into this. So I spoke a little bit about convergence. And given how critical it is to the success of the program, I'd like an opportunity to just go a little bit into detail, so you really understand what we've had to do and what their learning has been. So with converge ordering, the sales rep from a distributor and retailer operate within a shared ecosystem, and we simplify and streamline the journey as retailers and sales rep now are seeing the same single shopping cart and consolidating their orders and also looking at basically simplifying that user journey of the purchasing process. So we build a trust because you then provide uniform product pricing, eliminate discrepancies and also then you're kind of ensuring fairness in that transaction.

We are, as a result of that, we're becoming a lot more efficient, and we are allowing the retailers to then access the products that are also available and make informed decision about their orders. And we can push the best practices of a retailer easier as the sales rep can then fill the cart for them before they arrive to the store. And, basically, the focus then becomes more on, by default, I think this is what they need, and you have an engagement. And you're building on that relationship that you already have. And the retailer can also apply then the additional coupons on their app. And you're kind of also getting them used to trust it. I always say the formula for this platform and this program to work is trust, data, and experience. And it's a networking effect because more they trust the app, more quality data they're generating by transacting on their platform, and then more, better experience they're getting. And more better experience they get, more they use it and so on. So I think that coming together is really important and the converge ordering is critical to the success of the program because it underpins that customer satisfaction. Show you just the next example. I think now let's think about how to manage the limited number of tasks a sales rep can perform within that limited time period that they have around 5 to 10 minutes. And there are literally hundreds of tasks we would like them to do, or they'd like to do when they visit a retailer. So we need to be very personalized in a way of what we want, what we need them to do during the visit. And first, consider the business context of the retailer. If the retailer has not installed even the eB2B app, or has removed it from his or her device, or the past purchase behavior, for example, if the outlets not purchased specific brand that we would like them to either try or purchase, based on these insights, we've automated a creation and sort of recommendation of those specific tasks in the sales rep app to address the specific objectives of that particular retailer. And with that automatic reconciliation of the task and closure, you are then able to basically put a seamless sort of approval process to make sure that the visit is efficient and effective, that visit and also the sort of the next visit.

We also facilitate task specific to different business groups. So for example, personal care, we want to run campaigns on a particular deodorant or brand, or they want, or beauty and well-being may want to encourage first time ordering of certain products, and they can do that, and you can get very specific by business group. And lastly, I think through the automated tracking and reporting, we provide the sales manager real-time visibility on exactly what the tasks are and what the completion status of the tasks are. And the next step is we're going to start to gamify this andalso give them avatars and just make it fun for them and make sure that they are also getting their task completed. And task management empowers then, of course, the sales teams to operate with much greater efficiency, effectiveness, and alignment to the, whatever the strategic business objectives are.

And next one is, I think the day-to-day execution. I think providing the granular insight in the KPIs, I think is really important because that's how they gain the most relevant insights during the day. It's also possible to track the assortment KPIs, which is really important because we want to look at not just the breadth, but also the depth of the assortment. And I think this allows them to do it. By monitoring the performance and the daily targets, we empower then the teams to stay agile and responsive to the market conditions, so we can change things very rapidly. And, finally, visibility into performance, either at a distributor sales rep level or individual team member level performance, allows for sort of targeted coaching, better resource allocation and performance management, and, ultimately, you can drive the results. So we're also giving them some coaching videos along the way and building that entire learning journey on top of that. So as a cherry on top, basically our journey tracking functionality monitors sales reps, journeys in sort of real-time or what they are in their own journey and enhance that visibility into the sales operations role that they're fulfilling. And it enables better optimization around the roots that they're taking, territory management, and all of the customer engagement strategies that we want them to deploy from the local digital selling hub that actually, manages all of this. So that's on that. And then finally, I spoke earlier about loyalty. I think this is really, really important in a fragmented sort of distributive trade context.

Be-- I'm sure you're all familiar with how loyalty works. We're all part of some sort of the loyalty program, many loyalty programs I should say. However, in the B2B context, loyalty is differente specially when it comes to distributive trade.

We've customized, we've had to customize a retailer loyalty program and we've set a sort of new standard in eB2B focused loyalty capability for distributive trade. So what are the sort of some of the differences and why we've had to do that? We've drawn the basics, of course, from the B2C context, but then we structure the, which rewards the retailers based on the level of engagement, the incentivization based on their participation and also making sure that can then offer deeper relationships. And I think that a ligns also with basically both to what sort of desired and realistic behavior among retailers to drive agility because a lot of these customers are, I would say, slightly aged, not very digitally savvy or literate, and you need to make sure that you can engage them in a different way while also educating them, in how best to sort of digitize you in that journey and how this can grow their business. And, of course, there are other features like free goods. We've got coalition loyalty and gamification, which I mentioned that, actually we're working on. And this gives them sort of community retailing eventually, where they're able to talk to other retailers in the near vicinity and this is big in China, for example, but not in many of the other Southeast Asian markets. And by cultivating this relationship with the retailers, we could build that trust and retention and helping to fend off, obviously, the, some of the competitors were the digital first players in those markets.

So lastly, I think, and this is something which has been spoken a lot today around personalization, one of the most important capabilities is the personalization of the product recommendations, helping providing our retailers sort of the peace of mind that they are able to buy smartly and they can stock the most relevant products and in demand products by shoppers. With the advanced AI algorithms we now have in our, we call it IQ product.

We generate basically highly accurate product recommendations for an individual retailer based on their profile and purchasing patterns. And this literally-- This is something, of course, we brought into the platform, but this product has been in the works for many, many years and we've continuously improved that. And now we can add the insights of the browsing history, location specific, trends of nearby outlets, the transactional history of the of that particular retailer. So our recommendations are not only, I would say have a high hit rate or accurate, but they're also contextually relevant and that's really, really important.

And then with the insight on complementary product relationships and retailer preferences, we can then deliver the sort of compelling cross-selling and up-selling recommendations as well that drives the growth for the retailer and then, of course, for Unilever across the various business groups, product types that we have and brands. And by helping the retailers make more informed decisions, we maximize their shopping experience. They trust using the app more and then that generates again further quality data. And we position our sales rep more as a, not just a relationship expert, and an adviser, a trusted adviser, but they are then really helping to grow the categories within that particular small store that they have. And that really brings us closer to really the ambition of what we are trying to do in terms of totally transform the value chain in our distributor trade. So those are some of the examples.

And lastly, I think this platform's approach is really fundamental. And we would not be able to be where we are today, I think without taking that approach and without our partners. So we've really connected into ecosystem of partners to bring that in. And our, basically platform approach leverages the best from different partners across the globe, of course, Adobe being one of the key partners. But we also have a lot of startups that we work with continuously, unboxed just being one of them. But we have many partners and I'm happy to talk about that offline. And this setup combined with the modular architecture that we have allows us to sort of balance the experience also with the, against designing the, design for cost. So design for experience in the frontend, design for cost in sort of the backend is a simple principle that we have. So with that, I'd like to ask our Accenture partner and partner in crime to share a little bit more on how our platform is setup. So over to you, Parikshit.

[Parikshit Maniar] Thank you, Prashaant. Okay. Thank you, Prashaant. So I think while this was a very ambitious initiative and it is just one, one of the key things was our architecture, which was underpinned, has to be robust architecture. We had to design something which is replicable, which is composable, and which is scalable. And at the same time adhering to the principles of Mac, which is micro-services based, API based, cloud-based and headless because this is a modern architecture. We are to create something which is agile, frugal, and nimble and which can be scaled, which can be scaled based on the different aspects of the market, right? As we go live with one market, take the feedbacks and then change how it can do. And just imagine that this has to be done for digitization of the largest ever distributive trade initiative in the world by any CPG. So we had to cater to that kind of a scenario. So we took an approach of, how do we design that? So we took an approach of low code, no code, custom code kind of a thing, which built on each other. So let me start with, let's say, the custom code. So we meticulously crafted our frontend with mobile and progressive web app powered by micro-services to help us being flexible, adoptable and as well as get the right experiences for our customer and customer's customer, which was using mobile plus open-source technologies.

Next one is the functional components. So we used our SaaS players like Adobe Commerce, right? And we used the capabilities of Adobe Commerce to make sure that, okay, now we have, we use the right innovations for our functional component partners to build the right resiliency and the right, I would say adaptability as well as the reliability of that.

The next layer if you see is the platform components where we decided to use kind of a no code components, which are the best startups in the world, right, to use their best-in-class solutions. For example, products like either a Kinu or a RefreshTest, or an Unbox. Because they were agile, they used to bring the best of the new thinking, right? And that helped us. And obviouslypowered by the DevOps, which is, again, to help us make sure that, okay, we use the right integration layers. We have the right CICD pipeline. And also, we use the best of the products, which are again bringing the best of the technologies along with that. And the last one is infra as a code. So for example, our micro-services and our data analytics was infra as a code on Google, GCP, and Azure. So this really helped us being nimble, agile, as well as create a structure which was scalable.

And it really helps us. Now how did we use that? This really helped us in terms of allowing rapid deployment across all markets. So our principle was developed once, deploy multiple times. So we deployed a core chassis which has the basic characteristics of, let's say, UI, UX, your integrations, your cart, your registrations, and rest other features are localizations and customizations.

So it helped us to make sure that-- I give an example. When we went live with the first country, Vietnam, we went live in less than 100 days. But the second country, we went live in less than 40 days. We added a new business line in less than 30 days. We added another country in less than 30 days. And now the model is like that that we are geared as Prashaant said, to introduce a major market or a major functionality in four to six weeks, right? And this is helping us accelerate rollouts from months to days. It helps us to land innovations because then we are able to test in the market. We get the feedback. And trust me, in last three, four months, since we went live with Vietnam, we had introduced so many innovations to make it more robust. And now we are confident that we can scale from 3 distributor and 50 sellers to 900 retailers and 9,000 sellers. Right now this system-- And the markets have got the confidence to do that. And at the same time better use of infrastructure hosting because that is also a cost. How to make sure that we optimize that cost in the right way. Now this is something which is important and that's helping us to actually make it not only scalable, but rapid, agile, and very nimble in the market. So, Prashaant, may I invite you to kind of, in that... Yeah.

So I think that was really, really important I think, just to be able to do the platform and think about that from get go.

And because of that first horizon of making sure all our distributor sales rep are on the platform, all the retailers on the platform, only once that happens, then any of these digital capabilities are going to work. Because if the unassisted self-ordering remains super low, frankly, if the retailers are not going to use the app, then most of these functionalities that you're creating, they're not going to be able to do it. So I think the horizon one for us is making sure that entire transition across all the markets happens really well, and that in itself will drive quite a lot of efficiencies and growth.

And then from there on, it's really about making sure that we can start to get into the next level of thinking and ambition. So first is around the growth. Just imagine we can have white space expansion. We can go into stores and areas where we've actually, it's untapped. We can have the right assortment for the right stores in those areas.

We can effectively have segmentation. So not only hyper-personalization, but also segmentation in terms of having different marketing strategies or even route to market strategies for different business groups. So personal care wants to do something else, to home care, to beauty and well-being, to nutrition. They can all have slightly different go-to-market strategies, and they can decide how they want to allocate their resources so to speak and their trade promotion spend.

Just imagine if it would be possible to also customize the frequency of the sales rep visiting a store. Can we go from a model where they were, they're visiting on the static beat every week to a completely dynamic beat where they actually, they figure out based on what their task needs to be and only then they go and actually visit the store. Would it be possible to think about the analytics, where we can go from sort of performing these manual surveys of all the outlets within an area to update a database, to layering effectively all of the demographic, economic, and infrastructure related data to identify these white spaces that I call. So we're basically laying out all of these as the sort of the next horizon, which will start in the second half of this year once all of the markets are starting to actually onboard onto this platform. So with that, thank you very much for listening and looking forward to meeting some of you in person later on. And back to you, Ed.

Thank you.

Just another round of applause for Parikshit and Prashaant for coming.

I don't know, Prashaant, if you traveled the furthest of everyone in the room, but it's quite likely that flying from Singapore, you have traveled the most miles to come and deliver this content to us. I'm just going to close with a few final thoughts and I'm going to invite Prashaant and Parikshit to join me for a few questions and then we will wrap up this session. Just reinforcing the idea that this is one of the six main use cases to tackle the $10 trillion market that is growing. This eB2B retailer and converge sales rep app is one of the most common use cases that we're seeing our customers, particularly in CPG and even in the distributor space, starting to really adopt and work through. And as you may have seen in our roadmap session or maybe just seeing now, we are releasing tons of new features within the Adobe Commerce roadmap that are intended to help retailers, CPG brands, manufacturers, and distributors roll out their commerce strategies that's experienced led, data powered, and tech enabled. I do have some suggested actions from here. If you are one of our Adobe Commerce customers or if you'd like to be, come have some drinks with us tonight. The community pavilion is open this evening until seven for some of our hands-on demos of some of the features that were mentioned today. And these are just a couple of other sessions that are coming up over the next couple of days that I highly recommend. And we have also some other guides and tutorials for Adobe Commerce. If you're new to how Adobe Commerce does B2B, it's a good place to start. One final round of applause for Parikshit and Prashaant. - Thank you so much. - Thank you.

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