Arcade Beauty

Created in 2014, Arcade Beauty Group combines the expertise of Arcade Marketing and Bioplan: a production company focused on delivering samples and mini-products to perfume and cosmetics brands. With a well-established worldwide offering of samples, mono-dose fragrance packaging, make-up and skincare products, the company is now ready to take on the challenges of digital transformation.

As the beauty market is shifting from mass sampling to a more targeted approach, Arcade Beauty is developing smart sampling solutions that meet the demand of mainstream cosmetic brands. Additionally, the company offers new solutions that will effectively combine digital technologies with direct sample distribution, thereby aiming at a better return on investment.

In order to meet those goals, Arcade Beauty decided to undergo a complete transformation at the infrastructure level, and to implement M3 by Infor: a global enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. Michał Maciejewski and Patrick Zawadzki were kind enough to sit down with us to talk about the challenges of migrating the legacy systems of European sites into the cloud.

Deployment of a global enterprise resource planning software solution to bring the company together 

With a presence in the three major regions of North America, Europe and Brazil, Arcade Beauty has a vast and complex IT environment that servesits many production sites all over the world. At the beginning of 2017, the European infrastructure was scattered across different locations and providers, including four separate Active Directory services, two on-premises datacentres, and five independent ERPs – one for each industrial site.

Since the merger in 2014, Arcade Beauty has been growing into “one company” by enhancing global cooperation among dispersed locations. Consolidation and migration of legacy environments to the cloud-based platform, and the deployment of global ERP software, were both essential steps to achieving standardisation and unification throughout the enterprise.

Addressing the business challenges of migration requires careful planning and development of a proper strategy. The critical migration challenges include minimising the disruption of essential business processes, choosing the optimal time, as well as engaging and supporting the end users throughout the transition.

In order to manage migration flawlessly, it is vital to choose a dependable partner that will deliver a scalable infrastructure within a tight IT budget. Key requirements also include the ability to maintain the platform’s high performance and availability, while providing the company with the necessary support during the migration stages.

A hosted Private Cloud, enhanced with the software-defined network at the heart of the company

Tired of maintaining costly on-premises infrastructure, Arcade Beauty chose a Private Cloud infrastructure based on VMware technology, which is a hallmark product of the OVH portfolio. High-capacity bandwidth, reliability, security, and easy management of resources were fundamental requirements to serve critical business applications across multiple geographical locations. 

“It's worth choosing Private Cloud when we expect the service to be ahead of business needs in order to quickly release the necessary resources and create opportunities. We also value the reliability, scalability, and simplicity of infrastructure management with Private Cloud, especially in geographically-dispersed environments.”

Michał Maciejewski, IT Infrastructure Administrator for Europe

To simplify the process, OVH offered Arcady Beauty a free Private Cloud trial at the beginning of the partnership, which enabled the company’s IT team to plan the migration process in great detail. As the legacy environment was based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation, a direct migration was not possible. Arcade Beauty therefore decided to use the Veeam Cloud Connect solution to move the virtual machines into the new IT infrastructure.

Choosing fully dedicated hardware that is managed by OVH, with resources available on-demand, has enabled Arcade Beauty to effectively plan for capacity and to control costs while keeping them within the IT budget. The Private Cloud’s VMware virtualisation layer helps the company to simplify and accelerate IT deployments and to remain one step ahead of the rapidly changing needs of the business.

Thanks to the software-defined network (NSX), the agility of IT operations has increased considerably. In the past, expanding the network, creating VLANs, or even deploying a firewall, required many man-hours and kilometres of dark fibre cables. Now, it only takes a few minutes and a couple of clicks. The high-end components of XL+ hosts guarantee the computing resources required to manage the entire workload of the company, while efficiently running tens of VMs on each host.

“One company” – Increased productivity at all levels

Migration to the cloud is a cornerstone of Arcade Beauty’s digital revolution. Thanks to the Private Cloud infrastructure, the company was able to consolidate and centralise computing resources on a secure, high-performance cloud platform. 

Arcade Beauty uses OVH’s Private Cloud to run their critical systems like ERP, workflow software, calculation programs, and most of the Active Directory services that manage users and their access to the company’s infrastructure.

The Private Cloud solution also provides more resources, which translates to higher performance and faster request execution. Moreover, the company’s employees are now able to access their everyday applications remotely, so they can easily work from home or during business travels. This new digital capability has boosted productivity in all the enterprise’s departments.

One of the goals of Arcade Beauty’s digital transformation was to enable global collaboration and teamwork, to fulfil the “one company” vision. With the Private Cloud at the heart of the enterprise, Arcade Beauty has increased their efficiency by connecting all European production sites. The company is now better equipped to deliver innovative sampling solutions to its world-class customers.

Future plans are even more ambitious, as Arcade Beauty focuses on securing business continuity and better disaster recovery, through a backup site with a virtual datacentre in failover mode.

“Consolidating our resources on the Private Cloud platform has brought us 40% cost savings compared to previous years. Thanks to the new infrastructure, we also have the resources necessary to implement an ERP system that enhances business processes in our European branches.”

Patrick Zawadzki, CIO for Europe