Unilever

Unilever is an Anglo-Dutch fast moving consumer goods company with headquarters in London and Rotterdam. Its portfolio covers foods as well as home and personal care products. With manufacturing operations in more than 90 countries and about 300,000 employees, the company has a turnover of more than $50 billion. In 1996, investments in basic research and product innovations exceeded $934 million, leading to the filing of more than 400 patent applications.

This company with its wealth of knowledge forms a challenging arena for knowledge-focused applications. As a result, a lot of attention has been paid within Unilever to KBS development in the last decade. In particular, many diagnosis and assessment systems were developed in various application areas, ranging from manufacturing to product and process development. These applications were developed using knowledge engineering methods, techniques and tools for the acquisition, modelling, representation and use of knowledge.

As knowledge is the key source for sustainable competitive advantage, Unilever is paying increasing attention to knowledge management. This means optimizing creation, dissemination and exploitation of both explicit and tacit knowledge to create business value and compete with knowledge. For example, the company stresses the importance of knowledge sharing which is mentioned explicitly in Unilever's Corporate Purpose Statement:

Our deep roots in local cultures and markets around the world are our unparalleled inheritance and foundation for our future growth. We will bring our wealth of knowledge and international expertise to the service of local consumers — a truly multi-local multinational.

Carrying out knowledge management effectively in an industrial environment requires support from a repertoire of methods, techniques and tools. Unilever aims at tailoring and exploiting existing knowledge engineering technologies for knowledge management purposes in order to give knowledge management a more solid foundation.