L'OREAL LEVERAGES INFORMANCE TO TACKLE COSTS AND PROTECT MARGINS

Beauty and cosmetics leader expands capacity for manufacturing, reduces costs and improves product launch cycle time.

NORTHBROOK, IL - Informance International, a leader in manufacturing business intelligence and enterprise manufacturing intelligence solutions announces that L'Oreal, one of the world's largest beauty and cosmetics companies is deploying Informance solutions and advisory services in their North American plants. With Informance, the world-renowned consumer goods company drives and sustains manufacturing operations performance to increase capacity and reduce costs.

"We face new product launches as well as constant demand to bring down our material and labor costs," notes Richard Jones, Vice President of Manufacturing for L'Oreal. "Using Informance as part of our TPM initiative, we can look to the value chain to combat these concerns, rather than pass along the impact to consumers. In other words, we can step up efficiency and have an impact on profitability via operational excellence."

L'Oreal selected Informance solutions in order to assess improvement opportunities and align plant tactics with corporate strategies. They also look to the Informance team to make recommendations for the most efficient use of the information to sustain the effects of operational excellence activities. Plant and executive management will use Informance solutions to measure and report the financial impact of performance improvements, and to discover, evaluate and take action on opportunities in their manufacturing operations.

"Informance is proud to be part of L'Oreal's drive to achieve best-in-class manufacturing performance and Informance's unique IMPACT program will play an important role in this initiative," comments John Oskin, Executive Vice President of Informance. Using Informance to analyze performance and uncover improvement opportunities on their pilot application, L'Oreal has achieved a 15 percentage point improvement on OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), one of the most common indicators of manufacturing performance. This enables the global manufacturer to increase product volume in its own plants, and reduce contract manufacturing. This type of improvement typically translates to margin improvements for the corporation. In addition, with improved manufacturing performance, the company is able to reduce worker overtime, and improve the timing of new product launches. These factors also contribute to margin performance.

Other consumer packaged goods companies have started to look at the way cosmetics companies leverage real-time performance intelligence and improvement evaluation analytics for manufacturing operations. They have also started to realize that simple OEE tools are not adequate to drive the improvement portfolio – Lean, Six Sigma, TPM and other improvement methodologies. Cosmetics giants are among those leading the way in the adoption of platforms that deliver facts, pervasive visibility, and maximum knowledge transfer, along with real data, actual root cause analysis and a deep understanding of problems to develop one true path to fix them.

About Informance International

Informance delivers Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) solutions to help clients accelerate operational performance initiatives, drive operating strategies and capture actionable insight; measured by speed-to-value. Using Informance, manufacturing teams can drive corporate initiatives like Lean, Six Sigma, TPM, and other continuous improvement methods. Clients quickly unlock hidden capacity, increase productivity without additional capital investment, reduce inventory and labor costs, and increase working capital.