A Foundation of Mutual Trust

The program started with the design phase. The teams from both companies – L’Oréal and SAP – worked as one to define a clear set of objectives, identify roles and responsibilities, determine governance structures and communication channels develop an IT roadmap, and identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress. The first thing Jan-Hendrik Stricker did was to get his team to actively listen to what the L’Oréal people said – what their critical business issues were and how well they understood SAP solutions. Then the two teams went into interactive mode, with L’Oréal making sure SAP was represented in all governance bodies at different levels, as well as in its program management and integration team.

The quality of such a program depends on many factors, with two standing out in particular: the degree of mutual commitment and the degree of information transparency. In order to provide SAP access to the information needed to provide timely services, L’Oréal welcomes Jan-Hendrik Stricker and his team to all of their internal meetings. “All doors are open to SAP,” says Xavier Rodriguez. “They are even allowed to poke around in ‘out-of-scope’ areas.” This has led to unexpected discoveries. According to Xavier Rodriguez, every day the teams discover new win-win situations that they have never thought of before.

The SAP team proved their expertise, winning L’Oréal’s confidence and more business requests. As a next step, SAP expanded the team to include another 22 experts from different departments who are familiar with the concept of integrated supply chain management and who can be consulted ad hoc or on-demand basis depending on customer needs.

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