Visibility Across Functions, Brands, and Countries: How Estée Lauder Companies Achieved End-to-End Operational Insight

Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is a brand-led organization — around 20 brands, each operating with genuine independence, across 150 countries. That freedom is a strength, but it creates a challenge that anyone running a shared services function knows well: when every part of the business works its own way, the common picture disappears.

Process knowledge existed across ELC, but it lived in silos, in whatever tools individual teams preferred, with no shared standards and no clear ownership. Nobody could see how work in one function connected to work in another. Brian Coffin leads the process center of excellence within OneSource, ELC’s global business services division. His mandate was to change that and this success story explores how he was able to address these challenges using ADONIS.

The instinct in most organizations is to roll out a new tool and figure out the details later. Brian took the opposite approach. Before ADONIS was introduced to anyone beyond his immediate team, he focused entirely on making sure the foundation was solid: loading ELC’s full technology stack into the tool, building a self-service resource hub so mappers could find answers independently, and working through an HR master data file that arrived with 43,000 rows and needed to become something genuinely usable.

With the foundation in place, the focus shifted towards people. Training was built around a live demo in ADONIS rather than theory. Watching a process map take shape in real time turned out to be far more effective than explaining the concept. The approach worked. Word spread, internal communications helped, and  OneSource had grown a genuine mapping community, with around 500 active users across a division of roughly 800 people.

That community became the basis for something more ambitious.

ELC had roughly 1,200 static process maps sitting in a different tool, covering multiple affiliates and functional areas, but with no way to search, compare, or connect them. Migrating all of it into ADONIS was the moment everything came together. When the work was done, ELC had a single, versioned repository covering 13 affiliates and 8 functional areas, with process ownership formally assigned across the board for the first time.

It was exactly what the team had set out to build. And then the repository started showing them things they had not expected to see.

The company offers an employee benefit program that allows staff to purchase or receive products at a discount or free of charge, depending on factors like role, location, and brand. If you ask who owns the program, the common answer is that it sits within HR.

Looking across the connected process maps, Brian’s team found a different reality. The program touches finance, master data, IT, supply chain, point of sale, and customer service. While the whole organization thought it belongs to one function, turned out it runs through almost every part of the business.

That had always been true. It just had never been visible.

For ELC’s internal functional teams, this was the shift that mattered most. Where they once looked at each function separately, they could now see the whole chain and ask better questions about it. Comparing how a program runs across different countries or brands, spotting inconsistencies, bringing the right people into the conversation — all of it became possible in a way it simply had not been before.

When processes are connected across an organization, the benefits go beyond having a tidy repository. For ELC, visibility at this scale opened up possibilities that simply did not exist before.

• Hidden dependencies become manageable — functions that appeared self-contained turned out to be deeply intertwined, and understanding those links changed how problems get solved
• Consistency across brands and geographies — with 13 affiliates mapped in one place, differences in how processes run can be spotted and addressed before they compound
• Continuous improvement at a different scale — internal functional teams can now assess the impact of a change across the whole chain, not just within a single function
• A foundation that grows with the business — every new process mapped adds to a picture that makes the organization easier to understand and easier to improve

For a company as large and distributed as ELC, that shift in visibility is not a one-time gain. It is what makes sustainable, cross-functional improvement possible.