Retail News Update

L’Oréal, has completed a series of enhancements to its existing voice solution based on Zetes’ 3iV Crystal.

With over 42 factories world-wide and 4.6 billion products
manufactured in 2008, L’Oréal has dominated the beauty market for the past century and become the world-wide leader in the cosmetic industry. Always seeking innovation and excellence, L’Oréal employs the best technologies to achieve both its performance objectives and ensure customer service excellence.

As a result of its good past experience of the Zetes voice solution, L’Oréal has re-engaged Zetes to update and extend its existing installation. This new solution rolled out is a multimodal
application: voice is combined with barcoding and weighing to check the orders. This combination of solutions has been integrated with SAP, which steers the management of the L’Oréal warehouse.

Mrs Wendy Doucet, Preparation/Dispatch Manager at L’Oréal explains: “To improve our performance and facilitate the work of our employees, we had decided in 2006, to implement a solution based on voice technology that can also be combined with other data entry and audit systems.” Zetes was chosen due to its experience in this field and its expertise in the SAP environment. “The results were visible as soon as the solution was up and running,” points out Wendy Doucet. “We recorded a sharp reduction in the number of errors in the preparation of orders and thus improved the satisfaction of our customers.”

Thanks to 3iV Crystal, 20 warehouse clerks from the General Public Products Division France (DPGPF), in Marly and 17 warehouse clerks from Gemey Maybelline Garnier (GMG), in Ormes now work hands and eyes-free to prepare the orders.

Additionally in Portugal, L’Oréal has put its confidence in the Zetes voice solution to improve its warehouse business processes. In this country, 12 warehouse clerks from the Alverca distribution centre are benefiting from the advantages of voice.

Alain Wirtz, CEO of Zetes, comments : “We are very honoured that L’Oréal has renewed its confidence in the competences of our teams and hope to have the opportunity to continue cooperating on new projects. The combination of voice with other technologies, such as barcoding or RFID, opens up new possibilities to improve the business processes in warehouses but also in other types of environment, for example in the back of store area for retailers.”