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Product Lifecycle Management
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Blogs
Posted By:
Angelica Guoli
Innovative beauty brand incubator uses PLM to revolutionize its supply chain processes
In the ever-evolving world of beauty and personal care, manufacturers must have a firm grasp of materials and vendor management to ensure growth. With a roller coaster of change in the global economy and sudden shortages of raw materials to deal with, supplier relationships can be fraught with miscues and mistakes. Rapidly cycling consumer trends are difficult to manage, as well.
When cosmetics industry product development managers encounter these challenges, they clamor for more control and more transparency. How can a solid product lifecycle management (PLM) system help with materials and vendor management? And how can sustainability be built right into the process without extra work across fragmented systems?
Logistics, packaging, and sustainability challenges
Meet the team at a multinational luxury cosmetics and personal care brand. A branch of a billion-dollar personal care company, they are embarking upon a global expansion into Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond. Billing themselves the “small but mighty force behind your favorite beauty products,” the team is no stranger to harnessing the power of innovation. Yet their PLM system hadn't quite caught up with their explosive growth.
As a former startup brand with agile product development workflows, the team’s product formulators and other leaders were wary of a PLM system change, especially after the first partner they chose didn’t work out.
“We were used to rolling our chairs to colleagues’ screens for updates. But our success and subsequent expansion demanded a more powerful product lifecycle engine to drive our decisions across more stakeholders in other parts of the world. When our first PLM system didn’t work out, we were loath to start the process again. Thankfully, when we asked trusted friends within the beauty industry to recommend a new partner, the answer came back—you need Trace One,” said a Product Development team lead.
Automated workflows to evaluate vendors and ensure sustainability
Brand teams managing several launches began to use a holistic, quality-first workflow within Trace One Devex PLM. Their documentation was harmonized for the first time, securing regulatory requirements within every project. Finally, sustainability became part of supplier vetting, creating relationships that would work with the team’s commitment to environment, safety and health (ESH) initiatives companywide.
Out-of-the-box enablement
A luxury cosmetics and personal care brand needed their vendor and materials management to be seamless and to lock into every logistics need across the product lifecycle. They now use Trace One Devex PLM to ensure that this first step in its value chain—supplier relationships— is solid and pulls through to every other step in the product lifecycle. From sourcing raw materials to formulating products and ensuring timely distribution, clear communication threads through every vendor interaction. With thousands of SKUs, managing these relationships is challenging, especially as the company is expanding its footprint geographically. Trace One Devex PLM further simplified their logistics management with vendors by integrating with other systems using application program interfaces (APIs) that are virtually plug and play.
PLM and consumer trend acceleration
Cosmetics companies must be able to make data-driven decisions when tracking consumer trends. Teams at a luxury cosmetics and personal care brand use their Trace One Devex PLM system in concert with their customer relationship management (CRM) system to analyze consumer behavior patterns, including crucial feedback about their products. Constant feedback helps new offerings inherently include improvements. The result? Faster speed to market, smoother transitions from formulation to development to packaging, and optimal resource utilization. With this new transparency, the company reduced speed to market by 30% during a recent launch, thanks to streamlined processes. It also reduced costs.
Supply chain “greening”
Eco-consciousness reigns supreme among modern personal care and beauty industry consumers. Rigorous compliance ensures transparency and accountability to these customers. This luxury cosmetics brand’s governance practices have always aligned with and often exceeded global standards. Now, Trace One Devex PLM serves as the nerve center for regulatory and compliance teams to ensure they’re continuing to meet quality levels as formulations evolve and have global visibility into nonconformance.
A major beauty and personal care luxury brand uses its Trace One Devex PLM tools to orchestrate inventory levels, monitor sustainability metrics, and adapt to changing regulations, integrating sustainable practices into every decision. The team uses Devex PLM to follow the strictest internal requirements of development, quality, traceability and safety as it creates many of the most sought-after boutique beauty brands on the planet.
To learn about how Trace One helps personal care and beauty brands compete, innovate and grow, you can read this deeper look at using Trace One Devex PLM for beauty, skincare, and cosmetic product formulation and development.