With Ruum by SAP, Beiersdorf is able to get closer to its customers and exceed their needs and expectations.
From mass market brands like NIVEA and Hansaplast or pharmacy brands like Eucerin to luxury brands like La Prairie, Germany’s Beiersdorf is a household staple without many even realizing it.
“We are the inventors of modern skincare and have been caring for people’s skin for more than 130 years,” said Ümit Özdemir, global head of Data and Advanced Analytics at Beiersdorf.
Founded in 1882 in Hamburg, Beiersdorf has grown its company to nearly 20,000 employees and more than 160 affiliates worldwide.
“In agile times marked by fast-changing technology developments, global closeness and connectedness within the company can be a challenge,” Özdemir said. “This is why we needed an enabler to be able to collaborate across different departments and countries more easily.”
To step up digitalization, Beiersdorf is taking measures in every area of its businesses, including human resources (HR), with a new platform encompassing all aspects of an employee’s life cycle.
Growth and digitalization, however, are easier said than done, especially when it comes to managing projects and teams within a global company like Beiersdorf, with its large product portfolio.
“[Teams and employees] have different templates, different standards, and, most importantly, they have different ways of working,” said Vincent Tissinié, digitalization expert for HR at Beiersdorf. “It made it really difficult to follow up with projects, tasks, and deadlines. Teams often felt bogged down by endless emails, monotonous meetings, and repetitive reporting activities.”
Özdemir said the company began looking for an intuitive and simple solution for the challenges that result from increased collaboration across all departments and organizations. Other project management tools were too complex for all employees to use on a day-to-day basis.
“We needed something lightweight and easy-to-use for everyone, that helped us automate and streamline our workflows on top of all of the data coming from our business systems,” he said. “That’s why we chose Ruum.”
Launched in 2016 by SAP employees Stefan Ritter and Florian Frey as part of the SAP.iO Venture Studio program, the Ruum by SAP solution is an all-in-one project management and collaboration tool.
“Moving work forward as a team usually requires lots of repetition and administrative work. Ruum takes all of that out of the equation so teams can fully collaborate and focus on the task at hand,” Frey said. “With Ruum, teams have full transparency on project responsibilities and progress, and are able to work on their tasks without worrying about things like follow-ups or missing to-dos.”
Citing the timeline function as one of the Beiersdorf team’s favorite Ruum features, Tissinié explained that it has led to fuller transparency within the company: “Ruum helped us document and structure our project plan in a way that other tools could not. With Ruum, all team members know their deadlines and feel responsible to update the status of their tasks. Thanks to Ruum, we’ve brought more transparency to the game.”
Timeline is not the only feature to make an impact at Beiersdorf. According to Özdemir, the template function is also game changing. “For recurring tasks, we’re able to use templates,” he said, noting that Ruum’s templates have helped project leads save time by removing the need to create the same documents repeatedly.
With these features and more, Özdemir said that Ruum has helped with prioritizing tasks and projects for teams without anything getting lost in email inboxes and finally allowing teams to focus on business goals instead of processes and follow-ups.
“At Beiersdorf, we are working as one team, with one major goal: to make people feel good in their skin and to create true value for our consumers,” Özdemir said. “Ruum helps us achieve that goal.”
