Nivea

NIVEA, a brand of the German Beiersdorf group — headquartered in Hamburg, started its success story in 1911 when it launched the world’s first moisturizing emulsion. Today it is one of the leading companies in skincare. Present in over 150 countries, the company set up in Brazil in 1975 by opening its São Paulo office. In 2003, it opened its factory in Itatiba (SP).

The great challenge for a large company after 130 years in its sector, becoming one of the market leaders, is keeping service quality always above expectations. No company survives that long in the market delivering only the essential.

No matter how efficient your business model, you need to revisit processes and understand what needs improvement. Keila Oliveira, a procurement analyst, is responsible for that role 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 they didn’t imagine they could access.

See Keila’s testimonial and how we optimized Nivea’s procurement process.

The main challenges

Workload and process completion time

Reduce a new supplier’s onboarding time and create processes enabling a panoramic business analysis, with access to data that could be used to improve due diligence governance. While also ensuring compliance and efficiency throughout the process.

Decentralized information

Keila needed a platform that gathered all supplier information, both new and existing, centralized standardized information and made it easy to view each supplier’s onboarding and risk status.

Manual work on basic activities

Stop wasting countless hours on manual spreadsheets and reports. All without losing the quality standard a century-old company has presented to the market.

Due diligence time

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

Inconsistency in stored information

Without a centralized tool and the possibility of automated validation, information was sometimes lost, depending on bureaucratic processes to organize it in folders, and they only found out that past information was valid at the end of the procurement cycle, generating rework and occasional inconsistencies in stored information.

“Linkana offered us a platform where we could solve all our problems and also added value to our supplier management with important and reliable business information we didn’t analyze before.”

Keila Oliveira, LATAM Procurement Analyst @ Nivea/Beiesrdorf

The solution

Keila and the Procurement team knew well the problem they faced and what they wanted in a solution to definitively solve the bottleneck for onboarding new suppliers. They needed supplier management software with the flexibility Nivea required. That’s how Linkana came in.

Process automation and centralization

We took responsibility for simplifying Nivea’s entire bureaucratic process. Acting on onboarding, compliance and risk for new suppliers, we automated all data and information collection and enabled more useful time for the team to focus on strategic decisions.

All data in one place

The whole team could search, in a single portal, all information for each supplier. Certificates, public lists, federal revenue data and the entire range of documents. It was also possible to consult each document’s history, shielding the audit area.

Linkana action recommendations

With our intelligent software, Nivea’s procurement team received insights and indications of issues in their supplier base. We also built automated communications between procurement teams and suppliers to speed up the exchange process.

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

Keila Oliveira, LATAM Procurement Analyst @ Nivea/Beiesrdorf

Benefits generated

Operational efficiency and lower cost

By deploying Linkana, there was an 80% improvement in supplier due diligence time. In some cases, Nivea can qualify a new supplier in up to 1 day. In addition, the review process was centralized and now the only work the buyer needs to do to add a new supplier is through 1 click.

Risk mitigation

It was also possible to optimize the volume of information collected for decision-making and risk mitigation, with a 70% increase in the volume of information automatically collected on each supplier.

Consistency and centralization of information

With Linkana, there were no more inconsistencies in collected information, since all information was standardized and validated by both teams. There was also a reduction in fiscal costs due to banking data issues, which made NIVEA Brasil become a reference and create a LatAm best practice through Global Audit Beiersdorf. Another practice that reduced information inconsistencies was automating tax rule validations at the moment of onboarding, which used to be done manually before being inserted into the ERP — now done in an end-to-end integrated system.