L'Oréal gets business planning makeover

L'Oréal UK has buffed up its business planning and forecasting software to help it get the most out of relationships with its cosmetics customers.

The UK arm of the cosmetics company is using Cognos Planning software to forecast which products customers - retail outlets such as Asda, Boots and Tesco - would be most interested in buying.

It appreciates the time savings, flexibility and range of options the system offers.

For instance, with the Cognos software, the national accounts team can develop sales and profit margin projections that are tailored to each customer's individual requirements, from their electronic point of sale (Epos) data - the list of which products have gone through a retailer's checkouts.

In addition, scenario modelling can be used to forecast the success of customer or L'Oréal-led promotions and look at how seasonal variations may impact on sales and profits.

Before switching to Cognos Planning, L'Oréal relied on Microsoft Excel to forecast what products its customers would be buying off them in the future but these spreadsheets had become difficult to manage and highly admin intensive.

Keith Mattocks, project leader of sales and marketing IT at L'Oréal UK, said the Excel-based business planning system was "huge and complicated".

After getting over the usual learning curve for the new software, Mattocks said account managers saw "a huge amount of time savings" and "flexibility to do many more scenarios than they could do before".

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One account manager produced five scenarios for Asda in 30 minutes - a task that would have taken three days to do with the old system, Mattocks added.

Other features that impressed L'Oréal were the fact Cognos Planning looked similar to Excel, could work with Excel and could be used offline by staff who spend a lot of time on the road.

Mattocks added: "It's the first system I've ever worked on that's been called 'awesome' three times in one week by different people."