2021 Enterprise Automation Award Nomination: Estee Lauder Group: Customer 360 Platform

[dmiller]

What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? Describe the business and technical challenges the company had.

Estee Lauder has huge number of applications, databases, systems supporting various brands, functions, and regions. To embrace increasingly more agile methodologies that support rapid iterations and incremental innovations on shorter time cycles, the company came up with a modern integration strategy. To bring more flexibility to Application Life Cycle Management and enable event streams and APIs, they decided to incorporate suitable iPaaS tools in their integrations eco-system. In addition, there was an urgent need to support cloud services and mobile applications with scalability and self-service option, with internal and external partners. As more and more applications and systems start migrating to cloud platform, the company has been looking for tools with lightweight mix of application and data integration features.

The company has adapted hybrid integration architecture, to support its existing on-premise applications and ERP system as well as cloud-based applications. This approach helped them to manage high-volume batch and real time streaming data.

Describe how you implemented your automations and processes. Include details such as what SnapLogic features and Snaps were used to build out the automations and processes.

One of the main projects that the IT team delivered was the company’s customer 360 platform; a centralized platform that hosts all consumer information across multiple brands worldwide. The customer 360 platform processes all consumer transactions that amount to tens of millions of records per month. There are over 20 unique integrations that connect to the platform with multiple sources, online application to POS systems and targets like Blob storage and Kafka. This platform is used by the marketing, supply chain, inventory, and other teams who need to know consumer information to answer questions like: 1/Search consumer details and behavior, preferences and loyalty, 2/What’s needed to improve the products, 3/What’s the demand for specific products and brands, 4/How can they maximize the consumer’s life-time value via upsell and cross-selling brand products. Now the marketing and sales team can create better loyalty programs and campaigns with a more complete view of their customers.

Prior to delivering this customer 360 platform, consumer information would be sprawled across different sources, such as each brand’s website, CRM system, campaigns and other upstream applications. As a result, the different teams within each brand worked in silos that duplicated efforts, which could negatively impact the customer engagement, manufacturing and supply chain operations.

In using SnapLogic, the team has been able to re-use the same pipelines they use for a similar use case or functionality across multiple affiliates but customize them with relevant upstream and downstream applications and systems.

What were the business results after executing the strategy? Include any measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, % reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.)

About 3 years back, the team was able to deliver the first version of the customer 360 platform within 9 months and the platform has been evolving since then as more data from additional cloud sources are added to the platform. With the help of analytics, this platform has greatly helped in sales, loyalty but acquiring new consumers. Singles Day sales is a true success story for the company after executing the strategy.

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # of FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation)

There are 7-8 developers on the team that help build applications and integrations via SnapLogic. Not only are they building the customer 360 portal but also building ad-hoc integrations to meet business needs on the fly.

Anything else you would like to add?

Since the successful roll-out of the Customer 360 platform, the IT team also worked on building out a centralized employee program that is designed to synchronize HR data across various applications, like Saleforce, Ariba, SAP, ServiceNow etc. for data integrity that helped in implementing various business strategies. In addition, the tool is played a role in integrating both internal and external cloud applications in procurement and financial processes. Various workflow processes were enabled via Snaplogic integration, with ability to deliver approval requests over mobile devices. Overall, HR data integrity was maintained with tight security across the platform.

A new initiative is currently is in progress to integrate Consumer platform with Enterprise Data Lake with data management services ability.