Key Note Speech

Driving value through Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and the role of LIMS

Increasing business pressures, new market challenges and the opportunities presented by the digital age are re-defining how R&D delivers its contribution to innovation and growth. The need for easily accessible, joined up product information, organisationally, across geographies and across the full product lifecycle is increasing. Product Lifecyle Management (PLM) is an approach being adopted in many industry sectors to meet this need. For Fast Moving Consumer Goods companies like Unilever LIMS systems play a key role in PLM. In this presentation, Huw Evans will outline the need and drivers for PLM in Unilever and the role that LIMS plays.

Huw Evans, Information Director I&T CFC, R&D Unilever Huw Evans is an Information Director in R&D, Unilever. He is a Chemist by training with a PhD in Chemical Physics, and has worked in mainstream Innovation for the first 15 years of his 25 year career at Unilever. During this time he occupied a variety of roles in Research, Development and Supply Chain, across a number of product categories both home and abroad. In 2000 Huw Evans was tasked with rolling out a Specification Management system across Unilever which has been successfully completed. To build on this success he has been tasked more recently with helping deliver an Information programme for R&D which is helping to drive new ways of working in R&D and leading Unilever into the world of PLM. Huw Evans works at Unilever's flagship R&D Laboratory located at Port Sunlight in the North west of England.