The Company

For more than 100 years, L’Oréal has been known as the world’s largest cosmetics company. Headquartered in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine, France, the company also has five major manufacturing facilities in the U.S, as well as 15 distribution centres across the country.

L’Oréal’s century-old business and manufacturing plants were home to thousands of employees. And as the company continued to expand across the U.S., it recognised that performance improvement was the required approach when it came to equipment maintenance.

L’Oréal realised it needed a strategy that considered both capital and maintenance team performance.

The Challenge

L’Oréal needed a system that would not only help track asset health, but also help the team maintain the lifespan of its equipment. Furthermore, the team wanted a system to house asset information, including information for unique equipment and products manufactured on a location-by-location basis.

In recognising that asset downtime and lack of performance tracking would hurt the plant’s progress, the L’Oréal team band together to search for a solution. Their most pressing must-haves included functionality that would allow them to:

  • Maintain the lifespan of equipment
  • Pinpoint asset downtime
  • Execute multi-site reporting on common metrics

The team went through an extensive process to vet CMMS vendors. They assembled a small group that ranked providers that met their key expectations and checklist of features in a desired system.

After careful consideration, the group landed upon Maintenance Connection’s computerised maintenance management software (CMMS).

The Solution

The team relies on Maintenance Connection CMMS for:

  • Unique preventive maintenance schedules
  • Maintenance Connection’s mobile functionality
  • Automated reporting and KPIs for management
  • Executive reporting for a snapshot of maintenance performance
  • Real-time asset information and work-order progress from mechanics and technicians
  • Scheduled downtime and preventive maintenance when a machine is serviced based on historic equipment needs

The L’Oréal team also relies on the mobile functionality of Maintenance Connection. Now, any team member with a smart device is sent work order notifications while on the floor — without having to go back to the office to closeout past service requests.

“One factor we measure is the utilisation of our mechanics,” says Silverman. “We are always trying to bring that percentage up as high as we can. Now, one way we can do that is by not having them waste time going back to a central location to close out a work order. Everything is done remotely.”

The Results

L’Oréal leans on Maintenance Connection across its plants in the U.S. to minimise maintenance costs and maintain equipment of all types. And, with its multilingual features, the global company is planning to evaluate Maintenance Connection across additional plants.

Additionally, with the help of a Maintenance Connection’s customisable, intuitive CMMS software, the L’Oréal team can now produce detailed reports on top performance KPIs, house all asset information into one hub, increase mechanic utilisation on the floor, and decrease the risk of downtime associated with equipment breakdown. Maintenance Connection has also helped the company:

  • Quantify performance
  • Implement preventive maintenance schedules that diminish breakdowns
  • Minimise maintenance costs

“Now, when we speak with plants that are Spanish, Portuguese or French speaking, they can evaluate the software,” explains Silverman. “We see a big advantage in the enterprise. Although we have factories all over the world, we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve narrowed down the scope of vendors that supply equipment to us to a known quantity to minimise cost and the variety of equipment throughout the organisation. And, that’s a tremendous advantage enterprise wide.”