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christine_donato
Active Participant
3,071

Hummingbirds are challengers by nature.  Small, but strong and very resourceful, these tiny birds pack a punch well beyond their size.  Some species of hummingbirds can fly as fast as 93 miles (150 kilometers) per hour. Some can flap their wings 8 to 10 times per second.  And some are as tiny as a bumble bee and weigh less than an ounce. 

When Energizer Holdings Incorporated split into two publically-traded companies, the personal care business branded itself as Edgewell Personal Care and chose the hummingbird as its logo image.

Hummingbirds surprise and delight people, making them feel happy, and Edgewell products do exactly that.

With over 25 brands sold in over 50 countries, Edgewell is responsible for many simple pleasures.  My favorite is the fruity, coconut smell released when spraying Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil under the warm rays of the sun.    My sister prefers the smell of Banana Boat Kids SPF 50.  She swears by it because under its protection, her five beach-babies never burn. 

Edgewell also provides us with products to prepare us for everyday life like Schick razors and Skintimate shaving cream. The company creates Playtex, Carefree, and Stayfree feminine products, Diaper Genie, and Wet Ones wipes.

Edgewell products are those that we use at almost every stage of life.

The company takes great pride in what it creates, and like the hummingbird, Edgewell corporate culture embodies a challenger mentality.  Edgewell employees are “roll-up-your-sleeves” kind of people who help each other out and share a strong desire to win.

When Energizer Holding Incorporated divided into two separate companies, management needed to ensure that both entities would not only be fully functional, but also in a better state than before the split.

Focused on top-line growth, increased market share, and simplified business processes, Edgewell decided to replace a very old legacy HR application.  After comparing both Workday and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, Edgewell chose SuccessFactors, an SAP company, because SAP offered a rapid deployment solution and individual module implementation.

Edgewell replaced its archaic, labor-intense software with a modern, self-service model that’s accessible via mobile device and tablet.

In an interview at SuccessConnect Las Vegas this past August, Jermaine Holt, director of global business services at Edgewell Personal Care, summarized Edgewell’s technological journey:  “We were in the Dark Ages, and we moved past the 70’s, the 80’s, and into the 21st century…”  

Holt explained that the organization was ready for advanced technology. Most employees were already using mobile apps and tablets in their personal lives.  It only made sense to leverage this simplicity and convenience at the office too.

Typically companies struggle with lengthy implementations.  Holt continued, “Most companies don’t have the patience for back-office software.” 

Because of the company divide, the implementation project was on a time crunch. The solutions not only needed to be implemented and deployed at Edgewell, but also needed to be cloned to satisfy Energizer Holdings Incorporated.

The SAP Service & Support organization was selected to manage the implementation because, “The service and support team at SAP really knows their product. They’re able to tell us things that we don’t really see from an organizational standpoint. They tell us what to look for and what landmines may be out there in the organization that we don’t realize.”

By standardizing and centralizing many disparate processes, Edgewell is operating successfully as its own public company. Like the hummingbird, Edgewell Personal Care is fast, agile, and innovative.  The company is committed to delivering wellbeing and simple pleasures to its customers.

You may think that I’m being dramatic, but without the fantastic smell of Hawaiian Tropic tanning lotion, my summers would be bland and gray.  For me, that distinct scent triggers the release of endorphins.  It means summer, vacation, and an abundance of vitamin D.


For more stories, follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.


17 Comments
Former Member
0 Kudos

Love the personal touch to this story Christine.  I agree about the smell of Summer making you feel good.

Former Member
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Christine,

I, too, enjoy the fresh coconut-y scent of Hawaiian Tropic products, but what insight does that offer about implementing or supporting SAP solutions? What next: blogs about how refreshing and tasty Coca-Cola, Coors, Pepsi, Johnsonville, and General Mills products are that are produced in plants running SAP solutions? When do we see a blog about the robust and manly taste of Marlboro, a brand that is also an SAP customer? Does implementing the latest new shiny get you a free advert blog? Where does this advertising that is only minimally tangential to implementing SAP solutions end?

Gretchen

Former Member
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Gretchen, Not every blog post has to be about SAP software sales, implementation or support.  Although this blog does highlight the implementation of SAP SuccessFactors and improvements that resulted.  I have worked in the consumer products industry for many years prior to joining SAP and was not aware of Edgewell Personal Care and found this post to be informative and well written.

JimSpath
SAP Champion
SAP Champion
0 Kudos

This blog would benefit immensely from the removal of the blatant "product placement."  It may be a informative story but it reads (and is titled) like an infomercial.  A good editor can help here.

christine_donato
Active Participant
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Thank you for comments, david.zatz I also had never before heard of Edgewell Personal Care until preparing to interview them at SuccessConnect.  I was very surprised to find out that products I have been using for years were originally created by the Energizer company. 

gretchen.lindquist I appreciate your opinion, and I thank you for commenting publicly to the blog post instead of illegitimately flagging it and pulling it down.  I believe that jim.spath shares your opinion. 

I am a member of the Customer Storytelling team, and the goal of this team is to serve as the voice of the customer, sharing customer stories to help other SAP customers.  We share stories on SAP Business Trends at a high, non-technical level for the education and edification of an all-encompassing diverse audience that makes up the SCN community. We work directly with customers to share their story.  This blog, along with all of my others, was reviewed by the customer before it was published. You'll see that this story, along with many others, includes quotes directly from the customer. 

This blog is based on an interview with Edgewell Personal Care conducted at SuccessConnect 2015, and it provides the story as Edgewell requested it to be shared. Currently, more technical reference material is being created.  Once it is published, I will be sure to link this technical information to the story. 

As you can see from David's comment, there is an audience for non-technical stories on SCN as well as technical.  By flagging and removing work with which you don't agree, you are inhibiting those SCN members that would like to read my stories from seeing them. 

However, I welcome you to always provide your opinion in the comments section.  I appreciate it and will take your feedback into consideration when interviewing customers and authoring future customer stories. 

christine_donato
Active Participant
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Thanks, Jim.  The blog was reviewed by a very talented team editor based in Germany. Each story published by the Customer Storytelling team is edited by this colleague as well as reviewed by the customer.

Jelena_Perfiljeva
Active Contributor
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I agree with Jim and Gretchen that product placement is rather clumsy. It may seem like we are ganging up on the author here, but really it's not just this blog - it's the general overload of cookie-cutter blogs in this space. They all, essentially, follow the same schema:

Roses are red, violets are blue.

Rose-and-Violet company now runs SAP

And so can you.

Product placement quickly kills any warm and fuzzy feeling that may have been generated by the rose and violet story and the readers are left with unpleasant "infomercial" aftertaste.

Jelena_Perfiljeva
Active Contributor
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Christine, thank you for explanation. David is an SAP employee and Gretchen, Jim and myself work for the SAP customers, just thought I'd point this out.

I'm quite confused who and how exactly could benefit from such materials on SCN? People who don't need or can't understand technicalities don't read SCN blogs, so why not just post this on sap.com?

If your team is interested in an actual real-life SAP customer's reaction to such blogs - feel free to email me and I can send you the exact thoughts. They are not appropriate to post here. :oops:

former_member181920
Active Contributor
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Jelena, as you know, we've probably published dozens maybe hundreds of customer success stories here on the Business Trends space. As Christine pointed out, some of these stories are vetted by the customers themselves before they are published. Other times, we might write the story based on what they presented at SAPPHIRE NOW or TechEd.

Either way, these aren't soley designed to be "product placement" stories, they are designed to generate awareness about the customer, their business challenges and how SAP might've helped them address those challenges.

Judging by the healthy traffic and spirited discussion this space generates, I'd say customer stories and other SAP-centric content is in high demand here on the SCN. The reason for this isn't surprising. People can learn just as much (if not more) from a positive story as a negative one, even if it's light on the techie speak or other details.

In fact, it seems that you visit this space for the exact same reasons. Quoting you, from a few years ago:

"I like the Business Trends space in particular, there I find very interesting content there. As an SAP programmer I ought to understand the business users, I can’t be limited to technical knowledge."

Since this is an open community, people have the ability to post freely, in the space of their choosing so long as the content isn't offensive or inflammatory. I see a lot of content on SCN that I am not particulalrly fond of but I would never try to publicly embarass a contributor because I personally didn't find their content valuable.

Different strokes for different folks. That's what community is all about.

Jelena_Perfiljeva
Active Contributor
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Tim, yes, few years ago this space was interesting. Alas, didn't think at that time that my endorsements should come with an expiration date.

Jelena_Perfiljeva
Active Contributor
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In case anyone is looking for an improvement opportunity (which I doubt but still): this is what a good customer story looks like: The agile mobility project that became a huge success for a Norwegian Government Agency

While there take a look at number of likes and rating.

Jason_Cao
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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Hi Jelena,

It is helpful that you shared an example of what you expect a good customer story to look like. Thank you!

christine_donato
Active Participant
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Thanks for sharing your opinion, jelena.perfiljeva.  That's the beauty of a safe, open community space! Everyone is entitled to read and like the articles that suit them. :smile:

former_member181915
Contributor
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Hi all,

First let me acknowledge Christine's professionalism and grace for taking some hard feedback here. Very impressive.

Second, I'm reading more and more about communities and cloud companies and how important it is for us to listen to our audience and what they want to see in their community. It is extremely important to emphasize peer-to-peer, customer-to-customer, and developer-to-developer interactions as a cloud company.

As I look at this blog vs. njl.stabell's blog (thanks for providing that example, jelena.perfiljeva) the apparent difference for me is that Njal is writing in the first person. He discloses the fact that he was a provider of services at the company, but he give details that our customers can use to implement and succeed with SAP's products.

When we, SAP, write about a customer and what they do, it doesn't provide that same experience of authenticity.

What would be really cool is if we could get the customers themselves to do a blog with:

- what they bought

- what they did with it

- how it improved their business

- what were their lessons learned

Perhaps a fun and vivid way to do this would be to interview them, even include a video interview. caroleigh.deneen does this with SCN Member of the Month.

Just a suggestion - Jeanne

christine_donato
Active Participant
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Jeanne,

Thanks for your input.  The Customer Storytelling team is actually planning a podcast series that will do exactly what you just suggested.  The monthly, 20-minute long podcast series is titled #SAPTalks.  We will be interviewing customers from the small and mid-sized customer base to share the authentic story of their experience running SAP Solutions.

The podcast series will cover business issues, solutions purchased, how business improved, any challenges and how they were overcome, lessons learned, best practices, and industry trends.

You can expect the first episode on October 13th. Promotions via an SCN blog and social media are coming soon. 

Regarding blogging, the Customer Storytelling team encourages our customers to author blogs themselves, but as we all know, time can be restrictive, and as a happy-medium, we, the Newsroom bloggers, write the stories on behalf of the customer.  The customer reviews and provides input, interview videos are usually embedded, and additional (more technical) information is linked as well.  In the case of Edgewell, the additional reference material taken from our interview at SuccessConnect isn't yet published.  But as soon as it's ready, I will include it in this story. 

I think that you'll enjoy #SAPTalks and the more technical portion of the SCN audience may as well.  Fingers crossed! :smile:

Best, Christine

Former Member
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Tim,

Let me be 100% open here.

I appreciate your points. I would love to see a story about business challenges and how SAP solutions might have helped.

This particular blog, however, is mere product placement with a brief mentiin if biz challenge and the SAP solution and sadly, no connection beteeen the two.

"We needed to be profitable. We implemented SuccessFactors. Tick" isn't a very enkightening story.

I like a bit of fancyness in SCN blogs as much as the next person - having managed to get William Shakespeare, Celin Dion and German folk into my posts, but the information element should be the main focus.

Honestly: when I read the post first time and saw the first comments, I smilled and thought "come on guys, where's your sense of humour. Can't you see this is a parody? Seems the Americans have a second event similar to all fools day - and consudering it's American it's really good humour". Only when reading the defense for the post and re-reading the post I realised it's meant to be serious.

I mean: the hint is in the name: SAP-CN, so it's uo to you what you publish, but I want to give you what I think are 3 good reasons for changing the direction a bit:

1) there is a constant struggle against users using SCN for advertising. As sharing knieledge is, at the end if the day, done for improving a business or personal image (maybe not only), it can be a fine line. SAP now allowing such blatant product placement is sending all the wrong messages about SCN etiquette

2) If I was a customer, who's fees pay for the SCN as well, I would complain about it being used for sun lotion adverts

3) I don't think it even does any good for the customer brand presented. It's so into your face artificial (in this context / might be perfectly placed in the commercials break of a Downton Abbey episode) - it looks to me line it's deliberately ridiculing the product.

I appreciate all three points, most notably the last one, are a matter of personal taste.

Former Member
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PS: Christine, please don't take this personally. I appreciate you are doing your job as well as possible inside the guidelines set by management and what the customer allows to be published.

What could do with a change imo are the guidelines set. Probably an emphasis that makes me unpopular with all the wrong people higher up the food chain, but trying to be fair to you.