L’Oréal Travel Retail, which generates some 2 billion in sales, has gone digital, choosing Beyond Plans and the Anaplan platform to modernize its budgeting processes. This transformation has not only streamlined its operations, but also improved efficiency and collaboration within its international teams.
Challenges
- Before Anaplan, Travel Retail’s management of sales trends was based entirely on Excel, an isolated process that led to errors and a lack of harmonization.
- BU managers and General Managers manually consolidated data, a complex and unreliable process, while Corporate had to perform a global consolidation for top management.
- This system revealed several weaknesses: data errors, laborious manual processes, non-standardized file formats, reporting difficulties, complicated segmented management and increased security risks.
Solutions
Anaplan was implemented in two stages:
- L’adoption de la plateforme Anaplan s’est déroulée en deux étapes majeures : un pilote pour les équipes européennes puis une extension vers l’Asie.
- Une équipe projet mixte, composée de spécialistes d’Anaplan chez Beyond Plans et de ressources chez L’Oréal, a développé l’outil Trend Planning, déployé en seulement quatre mois en Europe et Asie.
- Le processus impliquait une étroite collaboration entre L’Oréal et Beyond Plans pour assurer l’alignement sur les besoins métiers et respecter les meilleures pratiques Anaplan.
The project team initially comprised 4 people:
- 2 Anaplan experts on the Beyond Plans side > 1 Solution Architect + 1 Model Builder
- 2 resources on the l’Oréal side > 1 Product Owner on the business side + 1 IT Project Manager.
Version 1 of the Trend Planning Tool was deployed in 4 months in Europe and Asia. For the duration of the project, the L’Oréal team was responsible for reaching a consensus with the business stakeholders, and communicating to Beyond Plans a summary of the expected specificities.
For its part, the Beyond Plans team was responsible for studying the feasibility of the business requirements and proposing an architectural response in line with Anaplan Best Practices and the target architecture strategy initially agreed between L’Oréal and Anaplan:
1 Development Application –> 1 Production Application Asia, 1 Production Application Europe
Results
User feedback has been very positive about the solution implemented.
They highlighted :
- Data reliability and security
- Flexibility of the tool: ability to work on several scenarios at the same time, possibility of entering data at different levels of granularity.
- The collaborative dimension: everyone can see the data evolving in real time within their user access perimeter.
- Tailor-made reporting for top management
On Beyond Plans side, regular feedback has enabled us to avoid major changes of direction in terms of architecture, and to be confident at every stage about the direction taken.
Following on from the first version of the tool, the Asian application will undergo further development in half-year 2 of 2020. In the first half of 2021, the American application was developed by a smaller team, and further developments were made to the Asian application.
Why Anaplan?
- The Anaplan tool met the needs of Travel Retail, helping them to be more efficient in analyzing their sales performance from one trend to the next, and also in relation to the market.
- The application generated user engagement, increased collaboration and time savings on low value-added tasks.
- The project was carried out in agile mode, with daily check-ins with L’Oréal teams.
- The benefits of this mode of operation were quickly felt, and enabled the L’Oréal project team to project themselves in the use of Anaplan.
- In the end, time spent on low value-added tasks such as data retrieval and workflow during trends was considerably reduced.
- Ultimately, business teams are now more focused on business choices and decision-making.
- Thanks to Anaplan, a business trend can be completed in 1 week, compared with 3 weeks previously with Excel.
