NIVEA, a brand belonging to the German group Beiersdorf – headquartered in Hamburg, began its success story in 1911, when it launched the world’s first moisturizing emulsion on the market and today is one of the leading companies in the skin care segment. Present in more than 150 countries, the company established itself in Brazil in 1975 with the opening of its office in São Paulo. In 2003, it inaugurated its factory in the municipality of Itatiba (SP).

The great challenge of a large company after establishing itself for 130 years in its sector and becoming one of the market leaders is to maintain the quality of its services always above expectations. No company withstands so long in the market delivering just the essential.

As efficient as its business model may be, it is necessary to revisit its processes and understand which points need improvement. Keila Oliveira, purchasing analyst, is responsible for performing this function at Nivea. 

When we met Keila and diagnosed the challenge she had to overcome, we delivered, as always, beyond expectations. We created value in supplier management and delivered information about the company's base that they never imagined they could have access to.

Check out Keila's testimonial and see how we managed to optimize Nivea's purchasing process.

The main challenges

Workload and process completion time

Reducing the onboarding time of a new supplier and creating processes that allowed for a panoramic analysis of the business, with access to data that could be used to improve the governance of qualification processes. In addition to ensuring compliance and efficiency throughout the process.Decentralized informationKeila needed a platform that gathered all information about her suppliers, both new and existing, centralized standardized information and made it easy to view the status of onboarding and risk of each one.

Manual work on basic activities

Stop wasting countless hours with spreadsheets and manual reports. All this, without losing the quality standard that a centenary company has already presented to the market.

Qualification Time

In a bureaucratic and manual environment where each new supplier took, on average, 15 days to have their data collected, inspected, and approved, dissatisfaction and delivery time were frustrating.

Inconsistency in stored information

Without a centralized tool and without the possibility of automated validation, information sometimes got lost, depending on bureaucratic processes to organize it in folders and only discovering that past information was valid at the end of the purchase cycle, generating rework and eventual inconsistencies in some stored information.

“Linkana offered us a platform where we managed to solve all our problems and still added value to our supplier management with important and secure information for the business that we did not previously analyze.”

Keila Oliveira LATAM Purchasing Analyst @ Nivea/Beiesrdorf

The solution

Keila and the Procurement team knew well the problem they were facing and what they wanted in a solution to finally resolve the bottleneck for registering new suppliers. A supplier management software with the flexibility Nivea needed was required. And that’s how Linkana came about.

Automation and centralization of processes

We took responsibility for simplifying Nivea's entire bureaucratic process. Acting in the registration part, compliance, and risk of new suppliers, we automated all data and information collection and provided more useful time for the team to focus on strategic decisions.

All data in one place

The entire team was able to search, in a single portal, all the information from each supplier. Certificates, public lists, federal revenue data, and the whole array of documents. It was also possible to consult the history of each document protecting the audit area.

Linkana's action recommendations

With our intelligent software, Nivea's purchasing team received insights and indications of issues in its supplier base. We also created automated communications between purchasing teams and suppliers to speed up the exchange process.

“Today we have more than 1,000 suppliers mapped in Linkana with easy access to anyone in the company, including auditors. We optimized the time of stakeholders and other areas involved in the qualification process.”

Keila Oliveira LATAM Purchasing Analyst @ Nivea/Beiesrdorf

Generated benefits

Operational efficiency and lower cost

With the hiring of Linkana, there was an 80% improvement in the qualification time of suppliers. In some cases, Nivea is able to qualify a new supplier in up to 1 day. Additionally, the review process was centralized and now the only task the buyer needs to perform to add a new supplier is through 1 click.

Risk mitigation

It was also possible to optimize the number of information collected for decision making and mitigation of various risks with a 70% increase in the volume of information collected automatically about each supplier.

Consistency and centralization of information

With the hiring of Linkana, there was no more inconsistency in the collected information, as all details were standardized and validated by both teams. In addition, there was a reduction in tax costs due to bank data problems, which made NIVEA Brazil become a reference and create a better LatAm practice by Global Audit Beiersdorf. Another practice that reduced information inconsistencies was the automation of fiscal and tax rule validations at the supplier's registration moment, which was previously done manually to be entered into the ERP, now performed in an end-to-end integrated system.