Commercial Impact
PwC partnered with Unilever to bring global price transparency and stronger competition to its road transport spend. New analytics and tendering capabilities delivered significant savings and reshaped logistics procurement into a more competitive, future‑ready function.
The FMCG industry faced significant inflationary pressures, with rising transport, energy and raw material costs threatening margins and competitiveness. Unilever remained focused on mitigating these challenges across its global operations. Road transport represented one of the company’s largest areas of third-party spend, yet visibility of pricing performance varied across regions. Procurement teams relied on different processes, tools and data sources, making it difficult to benchmark costs consistently, identify opportunities or execute sourcing activities in a standardised way. In a highly volatile logistics market, Unilever recognised the need for a more transparent, scalable and data-driven approach to transport procurement.
To address this challenge, Unilever approached PwC to help develop a Transport Price Transparency (TPT) capability designed to create consistent visibility across its global road-freight network and enable more informed procurement decision-making at scale. Working collaboratively, Unilever and PwC co-developed a bespoke analytics platform that connects to logistics and procurement data sources to provide lane-level insight into transport spending and pricing performance.
The platform created a single source of truth for transport pricing, enabling procurement teams to compare performance across internal and external reference points and better understand the drivers of transport cost. By combining market intelligence, operational data and should-cost modelling, the solution provided a level of transparency and decision support not previously available within the organisation. Buyers were able to identify pricing inconsistencies, prioritise sourcing opportunities and make more informed procurement decisions across regions and transport categories. The TPT capability has unlocked significant value for Unilever and demonstrated the impact that data-driven procurement can deliver at scale.
To maximise the value of these insights, Unilever later partnered with PwC to pilot a more standardised approach to transport tender management. Drawing on PwC’s deep category expertise, advanced sourcing technology and game theory based competition design, this approach enabled procurement teams to embed TPT insights directly into sourcing and tender decision-making, improving consistency and commercial performance across complex logistics tenders. The combination of improved cost transparency and more disciplined tender execution strengthened procurement effectiveness while enabling teams to focus more strategically on supplier management and value creation.
The programme delivered significant commercial impact, with early deployments exceeding expectations and demonstrating the effectiveness of combining advanced analytics with structured sourcing approaches in complex market conditions. Following this success, the TPT capability has continued to scale across the organisation and is now embedded within core logistics procurement processes.
Beyond the immediate financial benefits, the initiative established a scalable foundation for long-term capability development within Unilever’s logistics procurement organisation. The programme has strengthened data-driven decision-making, improved visibility of transport spending patterns and created a more transparent and strategically enabled procurement function that continues to generate sustainable value beyond the initial implementation.
View the profile in the MCA Members Directory.