L’Oréal and DELMIA Apriso

To make this goal happen, L’Oréal adopted an integrated deployment plan whereby SAP ERP and DELMIA Apriso were implemented together at each site. The DELMIA Apriso solution was chosen because it could be deployed at all the company’s plants, providing a single solution enterprise-wide. The L’Oréal team worked closely with both vendors to ensure smooth, successful operations throughout the process.

Today, the deployment project is complete with 30+ plants worldwide now part of a unified manufacturing operations platform. Clear visibility to material throughout has been captured. Best practices are now readily captured and shared across logistics, production and quality management activities. Further, L’Oréal can now more effectively drive operational excellence consistently across their organization, with full control of material flows and end-to-end product traceability.

By choosing a partner that is committed to investing in its product and leveraging new technologies, L’Oréal has not only met their goals of a global Industry 4.0 operations platform, but has best positioned themselves for the future. For example, adding new mobile capabilities can be readily accomplished once a DELMIA Apriso solution is live and operational.

A key reason why L’Oréal chose the DELMIA Apriso solution was its wide “footprint” of applications that extends beyond the plant floor. L’Oréal can use their solution to manage on-site production, quality, traceability, material movement, and even warehouse operations within a single, seamless system both locally and enterprise-wide.

“DELMIA Apriso enabled us to integrate all our manufacturing principles in terms of safety and quality and in terms of plant productivity and efficiency,” says Martin Rhein, CIO-Operations at L’Oréal. “In IS terms, DELMIA Apriso provides a platform that is easy to implement with a clear mission concerning costs and business cases. Thanks to the modularity of the solution we can cover all the processes of our factories which have different industrial activities.”

Improving traceability was another major goal of L’Oréal because of the company’s high standards for quality and brand reputation. DELMIA Apriso lets L’Oréal see both broadly and deeply into their production operations, quickly tracing issues before they become an issue, helping to raise quality, and maintain continuous process improvement.

“We can manage and monitor all the operational activities … to optimize product quality and traceability,” explained Plant Director at one of the L’Oréal European manufacturing plants, “contributing to increasing our Right First Time from 93.5% to 94.4%, and allowing us to have full traceability of products 10 times faster than before.”

While L’Oréal has automated process control and operations management, the company relies also on its workers to execute key steps in receiving, warehousing, production, quality, packaging and shipping. DELMIA Apriso has provided the ideal level of automation, creating a seamless workflow between people and systems that can respond quickly to change, helping to improve operational responsiveness.

Examples of how people and systems work together include:

• Labels are printed in receiving from a barcode scanner, then immediately applied by the operator
• In the warehouse, DELMIA Apriso tells workers where to put the goods, then verifies it electronically
• In production, raw materials are called by DELMIA Apriso and moved to the weighing station by Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV), allowing workers responsible for the weighing to focus on their job; efficiency improved 100%
• During production, operators can track process drifts on their screens and initiate corrective actions, if necessary
• During process production, correct recipes & material formulas are sent to the automation systems to ensure consistent quality
• During packaging, quality samples at the packaging line are automatically weighed and process drifts are tracked so that operators can initiate corrective actions

All L’Oréal plants now use the DELMIA Apriso solution, but the improvements are far from over. A L’Oréal Plant Manager says that DELMIA Apriso makes information “available in real-time, which is then visible to our entire organization. This lets us react to consistent data at any level, leading to process improvement.”

The flexibility of the DELMIA Apriso solution, and L’Oréal’s commitment to technology leadership, has put the company at the forefront of manufacturing excellence. And, as the world of manufacturing embraces the fourth industrial revolution and the Industrial Internet of Things, L’Oréal is poised to already have a manufacturing platform to manage, collect and best understand all the intelligence that will soon be readily available. The scalability, agility and “future-proof” architecture of the DELMIA Apriso solution continues to ensure L’Oréal will maintain improvement well into the future.