The Client

A 90 year old company based in Mumbai, that employs more than 500 people, it is India’s largest perfumery and fragrance manufacturer, with a turnover of over Rs. 400 crores.  

With factories in Mumbai and Gujarat, the organization manufactures a range of fragrances and flavours. The nature of their business makes it crucial to safeguard the intellectual and creative knowledge of a few key people.

Business Drivers

I. Creation of a knowledge base

Since the process of perfume manufacturing is extremely people dependent, it was necessary to create an organizational knowledge base to capture the compositions of various perfumes and fragrances. This would help ensure that no knowledge was lost by the organization, and would also assist in recreating perfumes whenever required by their clients.

II. Streamlining the perfume manufacturing process

The typical process for creation of a perfume involves:

• Receiving client requirements
• Matching existing perfumes for close fits or initiating the process of creating a new perfume
• Market surveys to derive inputs for the creative team
• Creation of the fragrance
• Evaluation of fragrances in product samples 
• Iterations with the creative team
• Submissions to customer, feedback & approvals
• Finalization of perfume formula and approval for mass production

The management wished to reduce the cycle times for perfume creation and thereby increase both efficiency and sales. Putting a collaborative framework in place to enable these workflows was imperative to achieve process efficiencies.

Arion's Solution

Arion developed a browser based intranet solution with the following features:

• Capture of Customer requirements 
• Project Creation
• Team Assignment
• Powerful Search
• Role Based Access
• Extensive Reporting
• Perfume Formulation
• Document Management
• Project Status Tracking
• Costing
• Fragrance Rating

Since the application was designed for use by industry experts who were not very computer savvy, the user interface had to be extremely intuitive. The system also needed to have the capability to handle a large amount of transactions and data. Security was also critical since the Intellectual property of the organization was at stake.

Arion recommended the following technologies for a robust solution:

• Operating System: Linux
• Web Server: Apache
• Development Platform: J2EE
• Database: DB2

Benefits

• Cost Savings

The system has been operational for over 3 years and has resulted in huge cost savings through reduction of cycle time, paper work and increased productivity due to better collaboration.

• Better Customer Service

Customer service has increased dramatically due to availability of statuses on demand and shorter response times.

• Knowledge Management 

Creation of a central knowledge base has ensured that organizational knowledge is protected and not lost. Ready availability of perfume compositions and their applications was a great aid to both manufacturing and sales

• Complete visibility and control over the perfume creation process

The Management is a very active user of the system and oversees all perfume creation activities. The management exercises control through the various reports, searches and escalation mechanisms that are present in the system.