The window to launch a successful beauty product may open only briefly. Maesa helps cosmetics entrepreneurs hit that window by incubating, growing, and manufacturing new beauty brands. Maesa’s expertise in marketing, design, engineering, product development, and operations have helped many fragrance, haircare, skin care, and color cosmetics brands succeed.
This dynamic business model involves many supply chain challenges. “New beauty products are the most likely to have drastic shifts in what customers expect,” explains Kyle Friedrichs, Senior Director of Operational Excellence at Maesa. “We are growing as a company and launching new brands constantly. Quick answers about our demand and supply enable us to maintain high service levels without holding excessive inventory.”
Bold moves pay off
The Maesa team recognized that legacy supply chain planning tools often couldn’t keep pace with the business. “We were using a system that was rigid and slow,” Friedrichs recalls, so he and the supply chain team looked for alternatives. Maesa’s finance team used Anaplan for financial planning and analysis (FP&A), and Friedrichs admired the Anaplan platform’s flexibility, so they chose Anaplan Applications for Supply Chain.
Leveraging built-in best practices of Anaplan applications, Maesa created a supply and demand planning environment in just months. Anaplan templates and models were aligned to meet Maesa’s immediate needs, and designed to integrate additional data sources in the future.
The Anaplan implementation was part of a larger technology transformation at Maesa: The company simultaneously implemented Netsuite enterprise resource planning (ERP), a new materials requirements planning (MRP) system, and a new Enterprise Data Interchange (EDI) platform, and integrated them all with Anaplan. The bold move paid off: “We completely changed the way that we plan, and created a more-focused system that allows us to grow over time,” Friedrichs says.
Live demand signals drive other plans
Demand planning at Maesa benefited from near-real-time information almost immediately. “Instead of a statistical forecast being run quarterly, we are now running it live as we are getting new demand signals,” Friedrich says. In one early demand-planning cycle, the team saw an almost ten-percentage-point improvement in forecast accuracy at the item level.
Improvements cascaded into supply planning, empowering Maesa’s procurement team to buy with greater accuracy and timeliness. “As we went live with supply planning, what it allowed planners to do is react much more quickly,” Friedrich recalls. “Instead of doing monthly cycles for component planning, they’re now able to see each day what items they do not have enough of.”
Automated alerts, coupled with Anaplan’s next-gen calculation engine, enable teams to react quickly to change. “With Anaplan Polaris, we’ve brought our supply and demand planning together into a single, integrated Workflow,” Friedrich continues. “What used to take weeks now takes days — we’ve cut our planning cycle time by over 50%.” With supply planning on Anaplan Polaris, the team can transition demand back and forth almost instantly, and replan specific items as the demand team gets new information.
Benefits beyond the supply chain
On top of these operational improvements, the Anaplan platform has also enabled Maesa’s data team to deliver useful information to people throughout the company. “Multiple times, people in different departments have come to us saying they need some sort of function or report,” Friedrichs says. “We can often deliver those reports within a day.”
And Friedrichs is confident that the new flexibility will serve Maesa even more going forward. “What excites me about Anaplan for the future is that we can bolt on new apps, modules, and tools with relative ease,” he says. “So as the company grows and becomes more structured, Anaplan can grow with us.”
