Edgewell Personal Care is a global personal care company behind familiar brands including Edge Shaving Gel, Schick, Wilkinson Sword (we love this ad), Cremo, Billie, Banana Boat, Hawaiian Tropic, and Wet Ones. Its portfolio spans shaving, grooming, sun care, and skin care products sold to consumers around the world, supported by an international manufacturing and distribution network.
The situation before ZMDM
New Product Introduction / Go-to-market
The initial focus was New Product Introduction. Across Edgewell’s product families, launches brought together Brand Management, R&D, Manufacturing, Compliance, Planning, and Logistics, with each team contributing information, reviewing details, and approving decisions before a product could ship.
Getting a product ready also meant getting its master data ready. Material masters, specifications, BOMs, units of measure, and other information had to be created and maintained across SAP manufacturing and order-to-cash systems, SAP PLM, and custom go-to-market applications. Coordinating that work took considerable effort, and teams did not always have a clear view of what was complete or what was holding things up. The result was a slow process, with data-quality issues still making their way into operational systems.
Annual Cost Rolls
While NPI was the core focus, the master data team also found a major opportunity to improve annual cost runs.
For a CPG company selling through retail channels, timely cost rollups ensure that changes in ingredients, packaging, sourcing, and manufacturing processes are reflected in standard costs across its manufacturing and distribution footprint. Without those updates, outdated costs can distort inventory values and product margins, weakening pricing, promotion, and retailer profitability decisions where even small unit-cost differences add up across high volumes.
This process placed a significant burden on Finance as well as Master Data team. Teams started preparing for this 3 months ahead to complete the work on time. The picture below shows the before process. It involved finance opening up tickets in servicenow and attaching an excel file to send it to master data team. Master data team then updated the costs using custom upload tools to update..
Pricing Changes
Why the existing Master Data solutions fell short
Even before ZMDM entered we would have considered Edgewell to be advanced in the practice of Master Data Management.
ServiceNow for raising master data tickets, SAP MDM for Material Basic View, Winshuttle for master data loading, SAP Infosteward for Data Quality checks, PowerBI based Master Data Quality/Health monitoring.
Picture of master data solution landscape before ZM
But the central these here is that business teams and eveeryone worked through master data team ..The broader business teams (finance, supply chain,..) did not have any connection to or coordinated approach for working together..
As a result they felt that processes took a long time, errors kept creeping into operational systems (hence the need for master data quality program). data entry into multiple systems..
Master data team became a bottleneck.
Enter ZMDM
Given the opportunity for improvement Edgewell wanted to rebuild master data management with 3 main end goals
- Improve the process speed
- Improve data quality in operational systems
- Let business own master
How ZMDM helped rebuild master data management with business ownership as the fundamental strategy
Speed
The Pursuit of Perfect Master Data Initiative