L’Oreal awarded for ‘outstanding’ manufacturing systems
The cosmetics company earned both the Organizer’s Strategic Manufacturing Award as well as the Operational Excellence Award at the European Manufacturing Strategies Summit.
Apriso, a provider of software solutions, supplies L’Oreal with its FlexNet global platform which it claims has directly contributed to this success.
“By implementing Apriso’s FlexNet as a global platform for manufacturing operations, L’Oréal has successfully expanded the results from our Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma and other continuous improvement programs,” said Jacques Playe, CIO of Operations at L’Oréal.
L’Oreal’s OEE improved by ten per cent
Playe explained that the Apriso solution had been instrumental in driving sustained change at L’Oreal by delivering expanded visibility to its operational intelligence as a ‘collaborative intelligence’ platform, which helped to improve its Group overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) across 20 plants in two and a half years.
“We are now targeting an OEE performance threshold of 70 per cent for all plants in less than two years. We could not have accomplished such a wide reaching accomplishment this fast, nor would we have won these awards, if we had not first built our platform-based Apriso solution,” Playe continued.
L’Oréal had lofty goals to improve agility, reduce costs, cut waste, increase operational performance and improve IT efficiency on a global scale.
The company claims it achieved these objectives with the aid of “ISIS,” a project that simultaneously implemented a company-wide ERP (SAP) and Manufacturing Operations Management (Apriso) solution for a globally consistent IT infrastructure supporting multiple processes and disciplines.
One unified operational system
The Apriso FlexNet system allows supply chain visibility and unifies operations into one system.
Jim Henderson, CEO of Apriso said: “We are delighted that L’Oréal continues to be recognized and awarded for their outstanding performance achievements by embracing an enterprise approach to manufacturing excellence.”
IT management with the use of new technologies will take more of a leading role in helping organisations to meet sustainability expectations and save money, according to Mark Blowers, a lead analyst at Ovum.
He believes new opportunities will continue to emerge in 2011 which allow organisations to work in a more environmentally-friendly way.
