Beauty and personal care brands are under great pressure from all angles—formula development, scale up, supply chain, regulations, sustainability and quality control, to name just a few areas that must be well managed to remain competitive. And the speed at which today’s market moves only increases the challenges faced throughout an organization.
Shifting to digital can help a company navigate these complexities—but it’s an undertaking that needs finesse and expertise.
That’s where Siemens can be brought in as a key partner.
Siemens’ software solutions deliver benefits in the short term—improved collaboration, cost reduction and fast innovation cycles—and the mid-long term, too—data-driven insights, enhanced customer engagement and more sustainable practices.
Eduard Marfa, global marketing director, consumer products and retail, Siemens DISW
Happi spoke with Eduard Marfa, global marketing director, consumer products and retail, Siemens DISW, to learn more about software solutions that optimize operations and keep companies primed for new opportunities.
HAPPI: How can Siemens help brands better navigate today’s complex and competitive market and stay in control of their operations?
Marfa: Siemens supports cosmetics and beauty companies in their digitalization journey, navigating the complexities of the market while staying in control of their operations through solutions in several areas:
• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): PLM software from Siemens helps beauty brands manage the entire product lifecycle, from concept to disposal. This includes product design, formulation, testing, regulatory compliance, and package design and simulation. Siemens PLM solutions cover the entire product lifecycle including specification management, recipe scale up and connection to manufacturing. By centralizing product information and collaboration tools, brands can accelerate time-to-market and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
• Smart Manufacturing and Automation: Siemens specializes in industrial automation and digital manufacturing solutions that can help beauty brands optimize their production processes, improve product quality, provide flexibility and reduce costs. This includes technologies such as industrial IoT, edge computing, AI and machine learning, robotics, automation and advanced manufacturing analytics.
• Quality Control and Compliance: Siemens quality management software helps beauty brands maintain product quality and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This includes tools for inspections, audits, document control and traceability. By implementing robust quality control processes, brands can protect their reputation and mitigate the risk of product recalls or regulatory penalties.
• Data Analytics and Insights: Siemens provides advanced analytics tools to help brands analyze market trends, consumer behavior and sales data. By leveraging these insights, brands can make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies and supply chain management.
• Supply Chain and Infrastructure Optimization: Siemens software solutions for supply chain management, include inventory optimization, demand forecasting, logistics planning, shipping costs management, CO2 tracking and hub/warehouse management. By streamlining their supply chain processes, beauty brands can reduce costs, improve efficiency and ensure timely delivery of products to customers with the minimum CO2 footprint.
• Sustainability and Environmental Management: Siemens software solutions for sustainability and environmental management, help beauty brands track and reduce their carbon footprint, minimize waste, and adopt sustainable practices designing more sustainable products while implementing sustainable manufacturing processes.
HAPPI: R&D departments are under pressure to create novel formulations. How can your team help?
Marfa: There are several things that I can recommend.
First, I would recommend the use of a formulation development platform that should be connected to a Laboratory Information Management System; these two systems are the starting point to control all present and past formulations and specification (sometimes spread into several systems across the company) and link those to the laboratory tests and records. This first step enables companies to control all the formulation IP and then apply artificial intelligence (AI) to iterate and optimize future formulations, analyze, and substitute ingredients easily.
Second, implement systems that connect the formulas and specification with manufacturing to speed up the recipe scale up process. Siemens has a unique solution in this area—named Enterprise Recipe Management—with unique capabilities designed to speed up and automate the recipe scale up process from months to just several hours.
HAPPI: Is this just about speed to market? Are there other benefits to shifting to a digital platform?
Marfa: Someone can classify the benefits into short term: improved collaboration, cost reduction, fast innovation cycles and mid-long term: data-driven insights, enhanced customer engagement and implement sustainable practices.
In a short term, the digital platform improves collaboration within dispersed teams and departments, allowing product engineers, formulators, manufacturing engineers, marketing and other stakeholder to access to a common source of truth; this also has an impact in the innovation cycles as your teams will be able to do more iterations faster.
When your teams get more used to the new digital environment and more data is managed in the system, you can benefit from information analysis and get data-driven insights coming from your customers, market data and past products. This is a potential area to apply AI to get valuable insights and improve decision making. A digital platform also opens opportunities to implement more sustainable practices, from reducing the number of prototypes, optimizing resources and supply chains, this will help to support your companies’ sustainability goals and targets.
HAPPI: Let’s’ talk more about sustainability. What are the concrete ways a Siemens’ platform can help?
Marfa: We have been supporting the sustainability goals of our customer with our solutions for many years. For every industry we focus our sustainability efforts in four main areas:
• Sustainable Products: Solutions to help our customers to create more sustainable products. Sustainable ingredients, recipes, new packaging, reduce/eliminate plastic, product CO2 footprint calculation are solutions in this area.
• Sustainable Production: Solutions to help our customers to achieve more sustainable production cycles and operations— including reducing the CO2 footprint of the manufacturing operations, energy consumption and more flexible manufacturing practices.
• Sustainable Supply Chain: Solutions to help our customer to get more sustainable supply chain and logistics. This includes control of logistics, procurement operations, warehousing, hub operation and shipments, and checking the CO2 emissions of the supply chain.
• Sustainable Infrastructure: Solutions to help our customers operate sustainable facilities, buildings and infrastructure. This includes building control, electrical network and services, and water/waste management.
HAPPI: Is this just for enterprise organizations? What about smaller and medium size brands?
Marfa: Small and medium businesses can also benefit from the same solutions that big enterprises use.
Let’s start by saying that these companies face the same issues that the big corporations face—they sell into the same markets and address the same target customers—but even when they are fast and nimble, they don’t have the same resources available to them. Cloud, SaaS and AI are key enablers that help SMB cosmetics companies to overcome these difficulties when implementing a digital transformation.
HAPPI: Where is the best place for beauty and personal care companies to get started?
Marfa: My recommendation is to start exploring our Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. This is the most comprehensive set of solutions, services and partner ecosystem that exists in the industry for companies of all sizes. In this portfolio we have included all our solutions tailored for every specific industry covering the complete lifecycle, end to end.
Siemens Xcelerator is the entry point for every company that wants to start their digital transformation.
Shifting to digital can help a company navigate these complexities—but it’s an undertaking that needs finesse and expertise.
That’s where Siemens can be brought in as a key partner.
Siemens’ software solutions deliver benefits in the short term—improved collaboration, cost reduction and fast innovation cycles—and the mid-long term, too—data-driven insights, enhanced customer engagement and more sustainable practices.
Eduard Marfa, global marketing director, consumer products and retail, Siemens DISW
HAPPI: How can Siemens help brands better navigate today’s complex and competitive market and stay in control of their operations?
Marfa: Siemens supports cosmetics and beauty companies in their digitalization journey, navigating the complexities of the market while staying in control of their operations through solutions in several areas:
• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): PLM software from Siemens helps beauty brands manage the entire product lifecycle, from concept to disposal. This includes product design, formulation, testing, regulatory compliance, and package design and simulation. Siemens PLM solutions cover the entire product lifecycle including specification management, recipe scale up and connection to manufacturing. By centralizing product information and collaboration tools, brands can accelerate time-to-market and ensure compliance with industry regulations.
• Smart Manufacturing and Automation: Siemens specializes in industrial automation and digital manufacturing solutions that can help beauty brands optimize their production processes, improve product quality, provide flexibility and reduce costs. This includes technologies such as industrial IoT, edge computing, AI and machine learning, robotics, automation and advanced manufacturing analytics.
• Quality Control and Compliance: Siemens quality management software helps beauty brands maintain product quality and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This includes tools for inspections, audits, document control and traceability. By implementing robust quality control processes, brands can protect their reputation and mitigate the risk of product recalls or regulatory penalties.
• Data Analytics and Insights: Siemens provides advanced analytics tools to help brands analyze market trends, consumer behavior and sales data. By leveraging these insights, brands can make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies and supply chain management.
• Supply Chain and Infrastructure Optimization: Siemens software solutions for supply chain management, include inventory optimization, demand forecasting, logistics planning, shipping costs management, CO2 tracking and hub/warehouse management. By streamlining their supply chain processes, beauty brands can reduce costs, improve efficiency and ensure timely delivery of products to customers with the minimum CO2 footprint.
• Sustainability and Environmental Management: Siemens software solutions for sustainability and environmental management, help beauty brands track and reduce their carbon footprint, minimize waste, and adopt sustainable practices designing more sustainable products while implementing sustainable manufacturing processes.
HAPPI: R&D departments are under pressure to create novel formulations. How can your team help?
Marfa: There are several things that I can recommend.
First, I would recommend the use of a formulation development platform that should be connected to a Laboratory Information Management System; these two systems are the starting point to control all present and past formulations and specification (sometimes spread into several systems across the company) and link those to the laboratory tests and records. This first step enables companies to control all the formulation IP and then apply artificial intelligence (AI) to iterate and optimize future formulations, analyze, and substitute ingredients easily.
Second, implement systems that connect the formulas and specification with manufacturing to speed up the recipe scale up process. Siemens has a unique solution in this area—named Enterprise Recipe Management—with unique capabilities designed to speed up and automate the recipe scale up process from months to just several hours.
HAPPI: Is this just about speed to market? Are there other benefits to shifting to a digital platform?
Marfa: Someone can classify the benefits into short term: improved collaboration, cost reduction, fast innovation cycles and mid-long term: data-driven insights, enhanced customer engagement and implement sustainable practices.
In a short term, the digital platform improves collaboration within dispersed teams and departments, allowing product engineers, formulators, manufacturing engineers, marketing and other stakeholder to access to a common source of truth; this also has an impact in the innovation cycles as your teams will be able to do more iterations faster.
When your teams get more used to the new digital environment and more data is managed in the system, you can benefit from information analysis and get data-driven insights coming from your customers, market data and past products. This is a potential area to apply AI to get valuable insights and improve decision making. A digital platform also opens opportunities to implement more sustainable practices, from reducing the number of prototypes, optimizing resources and supply chains, this will help to support your companies’ sustainability goals and targets.
HAPPI: Let’s’ talk more about sustainability. What are the concrete ways a Siemens’ platform can help?
Marfa: We have been supporting the sustainability goals of our customer with our solutions for many years. For every industry we focus our sustainability efforts in four main areas:
• Sustainable Products: Solutions to help our customers to create more sustainable products. Sustainable ingredients, recipes, new packaging, reduce/eliminate plastic, product CO2 footprint calculation are solutions in this area.
• Sustainable Production: Solutions to help our customers to achieve more sustainable production cycles and operations— including reducing the CO2 footprint of the manufacturing operations, energy consumption and more flexible manufacturing practices.
• Sustainable Supply Chain: Solutions to help our customer to get more sustainable supply chain and logistics. This includes control of logistics, procurement operations, warehousing, hub operation and shipments, and checking the CO2 emissions of the supply chain.
• Sustainable Infrastructure: Solutions to help our customers operate sustainable facilities, buildings and infrastructure. This includes building control, electrical network and services, and water/waste management.
HAPPI: Is this just for enterprise organizations? What about smaller and medium size brands?
Marfa: Small and medium businesses can also benefit from the same solutions that big enterprises use.
Let’s start by saying that these companies face the same issues that the big corporations face—they sell into the same markets and address the same target customers—but even when they are fast and nimble, they don’t have the same resources available to them. Cloud, SaaS and AI are key enablers that help SMB cosmetics companies to overcome these difficulties when implementing a digital transformation.
HAPPI: Where is the best place for beauty and personal care companies to get started?
Marfa: My recommendation is to start exploring our Siemens Xcelerator portfolio. This is the most comprehensive set of solutions, services and partner ecosystem that exists in the industry for companies of all sizes. In this portfolio we have included all our solutions tailored for every specific industry covering the complete lifecycle, end to end.
Siemens Xcelerator is the entry point for every company that wants to start their digital transformation.
