Case study
Digital makeover at The Body Shop
Cloud-based IT lays foundation for growth.
5-minute read
Call for change
The Body Shop is known for being forward-thinking, focusing on sustainable business long before the term became common parlance. Founded by Dame Anita Roddick in 1976 with her revolutionary belief that business could be a force for good, the skincare and beauty company’s message has resonated across the world.
The Body Shop has continued to grow and now operates in 70+ countries with approximately 3,000 retail stores, franchisee partners, online sales, and 30,000+ The Body Shop at Home sales consultants.
The Body Shop has big ambitions to build on its success, but its legacy IT systems struggled to keep pace, making it difficult to share data across departments. A more resilient centralized system would lay the foundation to transform the business and a cloud-based platform would drive better analytics across mission-critical applications, making operations more agile and responsive. Complex IT projects of this nature can take years, and The Body Shop wanted to see results fast.
When tech meets human ingenuity
The Body Shop tapped into Accenture’s extensive experience on large-scale projects to transform the business in 18 months.
Starting with a strategic roadmap, Accenture and The Body Shop created an order management portal for franchisees, and a new cloud-based SAP S/4HANA® enterprise resource planning system as the digital core, to help transform financial, supply chain and e-commerce processes.
Next, the team migrated 6TB of data to Microsoft Azure cloud, leveraging Accenture’s myConcerto platform to assess data conversion needs, develop testing and measure cutover quality.
Despite remote operations, the team pulled off the big bang data migration without disruption. To prepare, 100+ people worked together for a year. The switchover of 50 applications and 200 integration points occurred in all markets over a single weekend. The smooth go-live was a testimony to 18 months of testing. Clear communications were key, and the workforce was trained on the new systems to minimize disruption.
The Body Shop have got some really massive ambitions, and now I really feel like we’ve got a technology platform and a partnership [with Accenture] to achieve them.
STEVEN WOOLLVIN / CIO, The Body Shop
A valuable difference
The Body Shop now has a centralized, agile cloud platform to enable business flexibility and future growth in a fast-changing market.
Not only does the portal save time for franchisees with easy ordering, it provides far better functionality and visibility of available products. This means more accurate stock forecasts, sourcing efficiencies, and a seamless customer experience across stores and online.
Leaders now treat real-time data as a strategic asset to drive decision-making. Analytics dashboards give workers a single source of truth to gain reliable insights and can spend more time on what they do best. As a result, the company is transforming operations.
With its powerful new tools, The Body Shop can expand its omnichannel capabilities to offer customers more valuable and convenient services. Most importantly, the new tools and capabilities are helping to reset the business, so The Body Shop has the flexibility to acquire new franchisees and extend into new markets.