How Multidomain MDM Supports Data-Driven Growth and Operations at Rituals Cosmetics

Rituals is a brand manufacturer and fast-growing cosmetics retailer with headquarters in Amsterdam. The company was founded in 2000 and has had double-digit growth since the beginning. At the current pace, they open on average 150 new shops and expand to new markets every year.

In addition to their own stores, sales channels include franchises, travel stores, partner shops and an online shopping platform in multiple languages.

Since 2014, Rituals has been using Stibo Systems Master Data Management (MDM) to manage product, customer, location and asset data. Data domains are linked on the open MDM platform to establish a sole source of centralized information, feeding business systems that need accurate master data.

The trusted data source and business-supporting workflows provide Rituals with actionable insights that enable the company to make data-driven decisions to fuel rapid growth.

“The biggest advantage of MDM is that it guides us in our business processes. The fact that we can trust the data to be correct allows us to link relevant domains and set up workflows according to business metrics.”- Senior Manager of MDM, Rituals

Challenges

Rituals has an ambition to continue to expand with brick-and-mortar stores and enter new markets because its customer experience depends on product visibility and in-person interaction with the products.

The brand must be present in high-traffic venues where people can experience the products live and then perhaps purchase again online or at different locations. That means that all basic assortments must be available in all shops to ensure a uniform experience across different markets and channels.

Rituals leverages MDM to facilitate store design, provide forecasts and automate replenishment.

As a customer-driven company, Rituals needs to be able to trust its data to ensure a brand-consistent experience. Managing all master data together on a single platform provides a granular view of the business and an opportunity to standardize offerings and processes.

Solution

Rituals has moved from a siloed environment of applications and spreadsheets to a multidomain MDM system that unifies a variety of data. The solution links together locations, products, digital assets, PLM data, bill-of-materials, marketing data, assortments, furniture, suppliers and customer accounts on a single platform.

With MDM at the center of Rituals’ multi-faceted IT landscape, 150 integrations keep 60 different applications updated with accurate and rich data — including ecommerce, CRM, ERP, analytics, logistics, partner systems and channels, POS, forecasting, marketing and translation systems.

“The strength of MDM lies in the process management. The stage-gate workflows can be designed to fit your business processes and tell you what to do at each step. This saves us a lot of time and manual work.- Senior Manager of MDM, Rituals

Outcomes

Using a multidomain MDM strategy has made cross-channel analysis possible and created new insights that fuel business decisions that would be hard to deliver when managing data domains separately, such as:

• Managing product, customer and location data together reveals which partners and stores are eligible for which products because assortments are linked to locations and accounts.
• Managing locations, accounts and store assets together enables Rituals to standardize shop design and offer business partners help for store and shelf planning, such as how many items can be placed on a specific shelf, and how often it must be replenished. This reduces inventory and enables shop staff to spend more time providing customer-facing service.

In terms of efficiency, MDM accounts for many small but significant improvements:

• Instead of up to two months to create affiliate feeds, it now takes 15 minutes in MDM.
• During only 15 months using MDM, Rituals increased the number of store openings by 1000%.
• A new Australian website was created in just a few days using a new classification in MDM.
• The ERP implementation costs were reduced by 80% because the system could be quickly populated with accurate master data. By adding governance and automation to their processes, Rituals has been able to unlock the value of their data and facilitate data-driven decisions.