Estée Lauder Companies - IT Department of the Year
Company: Estée Lauder Companies, New York City, NY
Company Description: Estée Lauder Companies is the global leader in prestige beauty — delighting consumers with transformative products and experiences, inspiring them to express their individual beauty. We are the only company focused solely on prestige makeup, skin care, fragrance and hair care with a diverse portfolio of 25+ brands sold in approximately 150 countries and territories.
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Information Technology Department of the Year
Nomination Title: The Estée Lauder Companies' (ELC) Information Technology Department
Our founder was an innovator in the beauty industry not only with the breakthrough products she created, but with her unique approach to connecting with consumers. This modern-day concept of personalizing the consumer’s experience was introduced by our founder, Estée Lauder, over 60 years ago. She was passionate in her belief that women should touch and experience her products firsthand. She took to the selling floor to personally introduce them to her skincare and makeup knowing instinctively that her personal interaction, instruction and connection would create a lasting bond.
The Estée Lauder Companies’ (ELC) IT organization is a technology leader in the prestige beauty industry with a focus on driving profitable growth by maximizing the return on technology investments. COVID has had and continues to have a profound impact on our digital acceleration & technology transformation. Because of this, we reexamined our mission and adjusted our strategy for the acceleration of technology to capture and scale our virtual high touch consumer engagement and experiences to delight our customers in the context of a new touchless world. We refreshed our strategy and focused on the future of work, amazing experiences and matured our ability to bring initiatives to market at unprecedented speed and quality.IT has delivered 2 X more projects versus the previous years, our output has increased more than 50% each year for the past two years and we have delivered nearly 400 projects across the enterprise since the start of COVID.
By digitizing and integrating core business processes, enabling frictionless day-to-day operations, elevating IT capabilities and becoming a stronger business partner focused on innovation, co-creation and thought leadership we have had an amazing track record of success in the past 12 months. Our new operating model has empowered us to rapidly test and deploy technologies to support new consumer engagement models even as we have accelerated and dramatically increased the capabilities in our ecosystem. This is a thoughtful architecture of interconnected platforms that leverage a robust data foundation to power our consumer facing capabilities and a hyper focus on:
-Human experience: Consumer & Employee
-Agility & speed
-Data-led decision making
-Enhanced product quality
-Automation of manual work
-Innovation with breakthrough technology to build the future of products, devices, and services
With the move to a 100% remote work environment, ELC employees needed the ability to maintain efficient work productivity. IT was able to deliver:
-Within 2 weeks, we Deployed an Augmented Reality-driven, Hands-free experience with gestures, voice, and holographic interaction between Manufacturing Operations, R&D, Engineering and Quality teams
-Scaled cloud video conferencing by 500% in 2 months
-Seamlessly transitioned to a remote AV Concierge model
-2,000 Global Webinars attended by over 300,000 ELC viewers
-Virtual training and large group webinars increased by 450%
-In less than 10 days, ~340 laptops were sourced and shipped to New York area employees with 'work at home' functionality
-Implemented unlimited cloud virtual desktops: safe and secure access to ELC anywhere from any machine
-In 5 hours, Increased NYC remote access bandwidth and speed by 10x for Creative and Finance teams
-6,000+ peripheral devices delivered worldwide to employee homes
-Enabled safe and secure remote HR Payroll processing
The ELC technology organization’s ability to quickly mobilize, innovate, deliver new capabilities, drive collaboration and creativity across many different employees has forever changed the way and pace in which we work. We use technology with a purpose and humanity to boost engagement, unlock a better work-life balance, while improving stress and mental health related risks.
Simply put the Information Technology department at the Estée Lauder Companies can confidently say:
We Power Beauty