The customer is the US subsidiary of a global leader in the development and manufacture of hair care, hair color, skincare, color cosmetics, and fragrances for the consumer and professional markets.  The organization employs nearly 8,000 people spread across seven manufacturing plants, six distribution facilities, and five research and development centers in addition to its corporate headquarters.

Situation

The customer believed that, in addition to becoming faster and more agile in their innovation-related activities, they needed to create a “culture of innovation”.  The intent was to generate a greater number of ideas flowing through the idea development pipeline to produce more successful projects and product introductions, operational efficiencies, and general business improvements. To do this, they needed to involve the entire organization in the idea generation process.  In order to more effectively engage the creativity of the organization, a means for executives to communicate corporate challenges and to capture ideas for these challenges was needed.  They also wanted a structured, enterprise-based idea screening process integrating R&D, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Human Resources, and Operations that did not require physical meetings to review ideas. Finally, the customer needed a way to store ideas for search and retrieval to avoid reinvention and duplication of effort as well as a means for idea generators to monitor projects at all stages to increase ownership and participation throughout the organization.  

Solution

DataLan configured and deployed InnovaOPN, which opened up the ideation process to more workers while streamlining and structuring the review, progression, and visibility of ideas across the enterprise and reducing the cycle time to implementation of those ideas.  The InnovaOPN Challenge module was implemented to allow the customer to publish challenge areas and to enable submission of ideas against those challenges.

Benefits

The benefits included an increased number of new ideas, improved operations and products, and more effective business decisions.  It also resulted in more ideas targeted to specific corporate needs.