Customer stories

L’Oréal

L’Oréal maximizes the impact of client communications with OpenText. OpenText Document Presentment for SAP Solutions reduces the cost and complexity of customer communications, improving document control and access

Challenges

  • Difficulty editing labels on multiple existing systems
  • Complex management of multilingual documents
  • Objective to implement an integrated and robust solution with no operational impact
  • Lack of international standards in more than 25 plants

Results

  • Optimized document templates, reducing total from 93 templates to 43

  • Reduced maintenance costs and support time by 20% year over year

  • Established a central tool for better control and timely access to all documents

Story

The company specializes in cosmetic products, consumer skin care products and active cosmetics for pharmaceutical brands. The company also offers professional products for hairdressers, as well as a variety of luxury goods. They are also involved in other sectors such as chemistry, health, advertising and sponsorship activities. L’Oréal has a stated aim to attract one billion new consumers worldwide.

The optimization of document content has enabled us to better meet the needs of our businesses through the rapid and flexible prototyping of new templates. This improved speed of development allows us to accelerate customer communication, using the highly reliable technical solution adapted to our critical production environments.

Ms Liana Masero
Information System Competence Centre Director, L’Oréal

Their commitment to a global customer base means that multichannel composition of documents is at the center of their business requirements. The large volume of documents in question require optimal communication and traceability aligned to their central Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, SAP® .

Multi-country requirements present a major challenge

Document types that are heavily used by L’Oréal include invoices, purchase orders, delivery notes and product labels. These are all an essential part of their customer communications and therefore are critical for the productivity of the company. However, their existing solution did not provide the necessary capability and scalability that they need. In practice, the solution lacked the ability to adapt document templates for each of the many countries that they operate in. It was therefore necessary to look for a more scalable and flexible solution that was capable of meeting their document presentment requirements.

Selecting a solution to provide efficiencies, cost reductions and governance: OpenText Document Presentment for SAP Solutions

L’Oréal’s requirements included improved document traceability, composition and template management efficiency, as well as transparency. They approached OpenText in September 2011 as part of their Papyrus project launch to help optimize their document composition. 

Makeup and brushes on a table

The implementation of the OpenText solution has enabled us to streamline and unify our multilingual documentation models through a centralized, robust solution, fully integrated into our IT landscape.

Ms Liana Masero
Information System Competence Centre Director, L’Oréal

The project objectives were to develop an efficient, centralized and tailored solution for the composition of all billing and industrial logistics documents throughout the world. L’Oréal selected Document Presentment for SAP Solutions for its ability to meet these objectives and ensure total governance for all of their outgoing documents. The implementation of the solution began in June 2012, commencing with the creation base of 10 sample documents including SAP multilingual invoices and industrial logistics Flexnet labels. The results sought were achieved quickly and so rapid progress and further document development led to more streamlined and optimized document composition. Flexnet and SAP billing document composition are now carried out in parallel, due in part to the native integration of the OpenText solution with SAP. The solution has quickly enabled L’Oréal to achieve the project objectives, while remaining transparent with no impact to their users and their IT landscape. 

Reducing costs with scalable transactional desktop publishing

For the creation and distribution of their outbound documents, L’Oréal uses the OpenText editor, streamlining the various document types. These are then easily integrated with existing heterogeneous systems, i.e., various printing systems, multilingual environments, ERP and legacy systems. Document Presentment for SAP Solutions has quickly enabled the creation and automatic submission of documents in formats that are dynamically adjustable for L’Oréal customers, partners and suppliers. The solution has also enabled significant reductions in cost related to document creation, as well as the simplification of the related processes. L’Oréal now has a highly scalable solution that can be further enhanced in the future through the activation of modular functionalities. They have a clear improvement in customer communication and in the overall experience of their users. They are now in a position to produce personalized invoices and multichannel targeted campaigns and create tailored messages and correspondence via flexible models. They also have full multichannel control of information across print, email, fax, mobile, etc.

About L’Oréal

L’Oréal is the world leader in beauty, with an established global presence and 27 brands covering makeup, cosmetics, haircare, and perfume. Through the richness and variety of its brand portfolio, L’Oréal offers its customers the highest level of innovation in the cosmetics sector, while maintaining high levels of ethics and diversity. Their 77,000 staff are employed across 130 countries on five continents.