L’Occitane en Provence: Nurturing growth with a simultaneous shift to cloud ERP in 25 countries
Empowering operational efficiency with unified cloud ERP
L’Occitane en Provence knows best-in-class IT can bring true value to a business. The premium beauty brand transitioned its global operations from a hypercustomized on-premises ERP solution to an SAP Cloud ERP Private solution, fostering efficiency, insight, and innovation. It achieved this in the tightest time frame possible through the RISE with SAP journey.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail—natural cosmetics | Worldwide | >8,800 employees |
of IT customization eliminated.
months to deploy cloud ERP across 42 legal entities.
Vice President of Engineering, Core IT, L’Occitane en Provence
Standardizing a customized IT landscape while running business as usual
Since 1976, L’Occitane en Provence has offered natural, high-end, desirable beauty products and services while embodying the values of sustainability and inclusion. Not surprisingly for a business rooted in the lavender fields of southern France, all of the current-day retail group’s eight premium beauty brands share a mission to positively impact people and regenerate nature. This deep commitment to sustainability is reflected in the group’s status as a certified B corporation and its goal to become a carbon net-zero company by 2050.
Protecting people and the planet while running a profitable business of more than 3,000 stores in 90 countries is a complex undertaking. But L’Occitane en Provence’s on-premises IT landscape, which contained around 700 custom developments, lacked the standardization needed to support growth. The retailer saw that the best way to remain competitive and support its evolving business strategy was to move IT to the cloud. Embracing cloud ERP would help the company revert to standard and lay a foundation for the future.
Whatever cloud ERP solution was chosen, the project promised to be a challenge. L’Occitane en Provence needed to migrate 42 legal entities in 25 countries with core functions spanning manufacturing, supply chain, and finance set up on a single instance of SAP software. And to prevent business disruption and allow for production and distribution constraints, it had only one or two possible go-live window each year.
Vice President of Engineering, Core IT, L’Occitane en Provence
Enabling a big-bang launch with an agile approach
L’Occitane en Provence has had a trusted relationship with SAP since 2009, when it implemented SAP ERP Central Component. The company also uses SAP software including SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions. It saw that the SAP Cloud ERP Private portfolio offered the reliability, leading standards, innovative technology, and high quality it sought. Also attractive were SAP’s expertise in both the retail and industrial manufacturing industries and the ability of the SAP Cloud ERP Private solution to cover comprehensive processes across the company.
Having given itself a short nine months to go live with the portfolio simultaneously in 25 countries, the company decided to embark on the RISE with SAP journey. Despite the geographical and functional complexity of the transformation, the company used an agile project methodology, splitting the scope across 10 product owners and forming scrum teams comprising IT and business owners. This ambitious timeline was deliberately chosen to minimize disruption to business operations and help ensure faster time to value.
While standardization was a top priority, the company opted to go live with the existing setup in cases where following standard processes was too complex or risky in the short term. The plan was to address these cases gradually after the initial rollout.
This agile methodology was not the only key to project success. The large team of experts involved exhibited an outstanding level of engagement that helped the conversion go to plan.
Unifying processes, improving visibility, and making smart decisions
Thanks to this highly dedicated implementation team and the RISE with SAP journey, L’Occitane en Provence met its critical deadline of switching on SAP Cloud ERP Private simultaneously in 25 countries. The global organization now has a high-impact cloud ERP solution that supports data-driven decision-making and enables greater operational efficiency across functions. It runs a clean core based on unified, simplified cloud ERP that is more secure, robust, and sustainable.
Some benefits are already apparent across different functions. For instance, combining product-level accounting data with cost-splitting functionality and general-ledger reporting enables faster financial analysis, while query browsers based on the SAP Fiori user experience underpin new reports, such as the “stock on posting” date.
What’s more, returning to standards has helped improve operational processes. For example, whereas the company previously experienced high volumes of errors when managing some types of deliveries, adopting a standardized approach has helped make this process easier and smoother.
Moving forward with unified cloud ERP and SAP’s innovation road map
L’Occitane en Provence is now focusing on how it can use SAP Cloud ERP Private to help elevate its brand with artificial intelligence and greater process efficiency. It sees huge potential for automating low-value or repetitive tasks and increasing productivity using embedded AI and the Joule copilot.
It also wants to empower teams to become more data driven and add even greater value to the business using intuitive solutions based on SAP Fiori, predictive and simulation models, and intelligent, real-time insights.
These plans illustrate that, for L’Occitane en Provence, SAP is not just an IT provider: it’s a long-term partner that can help the company evolve and stay competitive in a fast-evolving retail and beauty landscape.