Business Situation
Every year, L’Oréal Luxury Product Division develops over 400 new products. In the cosmetics industry, the two main differentiators for new innovations are time to market and quality of product. L’Oreal Luxe needed a system to help them manage the product development process. In particular they wished to achieve the following:

• To have one global view of all the projects that were developing new products for launch
• To be able to form a view on prioritisation and be able to make the right resource allocation decisions
• To improve quality
• To track engagements with commercial subsidiary companies

Solution
Avanade partnered with L’Oreal to develop a solution which creates an environment for project management of all new project launches. The system also facilitates better cross-company communication and gives an overview which can be used by all the team members who would be involved in a product launch (From Research to Marketing to Manufacture).

The multi-facted solution which uses a range of Microsoft technology including MS Project Professional 2003, MS Project Server 2003, Office 2003, Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, SQL Server 2000, Analysis Services 2000, Reporting Services 2000 & Visual Studio 2003 addresses the main challenges posed by the new product development process.

• Project Management:
  Project Server 2003 offers the ability to project manager to define project plans and to assign tasks to resources. Then each resource has the ability to update his tasks online and transfer them to project manager for approval. Each project in a program could have constraint links that give to program managers the ability to analyze how a delay on a task could impact not only the project but the full program.

• Collaboration:
  Sharepoint Portal provides collaboration and documents management functionalities to team members.

• Reporting:
  Reporting Services allow program manager and top executives to reports on Projects Portfolio with data coming not only from project server but also from business data.

 

Results
The delivery of the solution has allowed L’Oreal to:

• Track and Follow up product development projects across the company
• Benefit from improved collaboration bet