Beauty giant gives IT systems multimillion makeover

Cosmetics giant Coty has saved millions by using a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to integrating systems following an acquisition.

Last July, the company, which owns cosmetics brands including David and Victoria Beckham, Sarah Jessica Parker and Rimmel, bought Unilever Cosmetics International for $800m, adding perfume licenses for brands including Calvin Klein to its portfolio.

Coty's global CIO David Berry explained that getting the merger of the two companies done fast was vital: "It was very much a case of how do we merge the companies together and generate savings as part of the acquisition.

"The longer it takes to merge, the more it costs us in ongoing costs - plus you are deferring savings, so you take a double hit. I needed to get the IT stuff done so it wouldn't become a blocker."

On top of this, in November Coty signed a five-year contract with IBM for procurement services across 14 countries, which would also require integration work.

Berry told silicon.com: "So I'm faced with two major integration projects. We could either write a mountain of code or we could look at alternative ways of doing this."

Berry was tasked with connecting up a range of different systems from vendors including Oracle and SAP but was reluctant to use traditional integration methods.

He explained: "It would have taken us at least a year, knowing the amount of software we would have had to write, while keeping the lights on and running the business as well. We are a cosmetics company not an IT company. I didn't want to write any code to integrate the systems and we didn't write any code to do it."

Instead Coty developed a service oriented architecture using technology from iWay Software, a subsidiary of Information Builders.

By April it had gone live with the project in the first three countries - France, Italy and Spain. The system will launch in the UK in May, with other countries following in July.

Berry said: "What we tried to do was take the best parts of what LCI was doing and integrate that with what we were doing. I had an open mind to the way we integrated the businesses - we tried to do a mix of the various systems."

By merging the companies, Berry said he has saved $7m off the IT budget, and using the SOA approach has saved money too: "I think it will cost half what it would have cost traditionally," he said.