45
Manufacturing sites
WCOM™ Boosts Production Capacity 20% and OEE 12% in Cosmetics
A world-leading cosmetics manufacturer faced cultural, operational and scalability challenges across its global production footprint. EFESO partnered with the organization to deploy a multi-year, multi-continent WCOM™ program; achieving company-wide recognition for operational excellence.
Life Sciences
Manufacturing
Operational Excellence
Operations Strategy and Transformation
Our Client
The client is a global leader in the cosmetics and beauty industry encompassing 45 manufacturing sites and 18 research centers worldwide. Employing over 77,000 people across more than 150 nationalities. One of the world's leading cosmetics manufacturing groups, which has four divisions: FMCG, Luxury, Professional Products and Cosmetic Active Products
+77K
Employees
€23B
Annual turnover
The Challenge
Despite its market leadership, the company faced persistent operational and organizational constraints:
- Commercial dominance over operations: Marketing priorities overshadowed manufacturing realities, creating misalignment between brand ambitions and industrial capacity
- Past consulting failures: Negative experiences with prior consultants fostered skepticism and resistance to change
- Perceived self-sufficiency: Confidence in existing practices limited openness to external methodologies such as WCOM™
- No prior global consulting partnership: The company had never engaged with a worldwide consulting partner capable of scaling transformation across continents
To unlock global performance potential, the client needed a proven operating system capable of unifying practices, strengthening capabilities and creating measurable, plant-level and corporate-level results.
Real Results Achieved Together
Through a phased global rollout, EFESO helped the organization build a unified operational model, embedding WCOM™ standards across continents and transforming site performance at scale.
+20%
Increase in global production capacity using the same plants
+12%
OEE improvement (from 58% to 70%)
-30%
Material losses reduction
Transformation Impact
- First successful worldwide deployment of a WCOM™ program with 259 improvement teams launched to drive transformation locally.
- 20% rise in global organizational involvement within two years
- Recognition as the winner of the corporate Operational Excellence Prize
- One plant awarded Best French Plant of the Year
Our Approach
EFESO designed and executed a staged WCOM™ rollout aligned with the company’s manufacturing maturity and geographic priorities. The journey began with a pilot in Mexico and progressively expanded across regions:
- Year 1: First plant in Mexico and new greenfield sites
- Years 2–4: 14 European plants added, alongside continued onboarding of new facilities
- Years 2–3: Deployment in 8 North and Latin American plants
- Years 3–4: Engagement across 4 Asian plants
- Years 3–4: Rollout to 2 African plants and additional new installations
EFESO embedded governance routines, coaching, implementation standards and capability-building programs to ensure consistent adoption. The structured approach unified the company’s operating model, enabling measurable performance acceleration at plant and global levels.
Related Services
Aging equipment meets rising costs and technology disruption. We transform operations through smart factory integration, predictive maintenance, and workforce capability building.
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