Cosmetics Multinational reduces time to market in complex scenario

A Brazilian company sought a unified vision for governance and resource optimization to increase delivery speed

Brazil’s largest cosmetics multinational has over 50 years of history, several well-positioned brands in the market, and millions of consumers. Additionally, it is internationally recognized for its innovation and sustainability initiatives.

In an increasingly competitive market where consumers constantly seek novelty, the need for solutions that provide speed in deliveries is one of the company’s main challenges. To simplify this scenario, a strategic partnership was formed with Objective, a pioneering company in agile methodologies and continuous improvement techniques. This partnership resulted in the success story you will understand in detail below:

Complexity as a barrier

For this large manufacturing company to function, an integrated and interdependent production chain is necessary, dealing with complex workflows to deliver innovative products to the market quickly.

Thus, complexity becomes a barrier in the pursuit of delivery speed, innovation acceleration, and reduction of Time to Market. This is because it involves a workflow that includes 15 teams and 250 employees. This integrated scenario faces obstacles in optimization between allocation and skills, leading to sluggishness in this production chain. Moreover, the proportion and interdependence among various brands of this company cause a lack of visibility into demands and capacities for governance.

The power of Unified Flow

To address this challenge, Objective’s experts implemented the foundations of Unified Flow. This strategic model, based on Kanban, allows business scaling through a shared operational flow, where multiple teams work on multiple demands with a single backlog and load balancing. These shared queues in a pull system with strong Work In Progress (WIP), automation, slack, and load management bring balance and visibility to complex scenarios.

Objective’s agile consultancy operated at the operational and tactical levels of the company in resolving challenges in team workflows and systematically sharing knowledge. This process aligned team skills in Lean and Kanban and also initiated a culture of visual management and metrics for governance.

Simplifying a complex scenario

The implementation of the unified flow began with mapping and redesigning the current workflow. Thus, workloads and demand entry models were defined, and the new flow was designed.

This flow outlined queues and demanders, providing an integrated view between areas with visibility into ongoing items and project grouping. This allowed workload management and delivery capacity. Additionally, it identified areas of waste that were subsequently eliminated.

This process provided responses on capacity, defined at least one focal point for each team, added metrics to problem-solving, and governance management, which now had planning and monitoring based on structured data. Furthermore, it provided clearer answers for the company’s tactical level and reduced Time to Market.

Evolution and continuous improvement

The next step in this partnership includes continuous flow evolution and deeper metrics at the strategic level. In this regard, Objective’s team of specialists will assist in integrating workflows and effectively building a metrics-based management culture that will bring about an evolution in the company’s strategic vision and significant improvement in decision-making.

Does your company have complex workflows and a lack of visibility into capacity and delivery time? Talk to our specialists, share your organization’s challenges, and discover how Unified Flow can help scale your business!