Clarifying the role of a global beauty leader's parent company
Situation and challenges
As a result of its history, the parent company of a beauty-specialized group naturally houses, on the one hand, the functions of managing the subsidiary portfolio, on the other hand, the steering activities of the group's various divisions, and finally, the commercial, production, and R&D operations in France.
This situation leads to inefficiencies perceived by the group's General Management:
- Shareholder governance inefficiencies: the parent company's board of directors is bogged down by highly operational issues related to French activities, to the detriment of strategic considerations and key group challenges
- Managerial inefficiencies: the intertwining within major functions of group-wide activities and activities dedicated to France creates ambiguities regarding areas of responsibility, the scope of decisions made, conflicting directives, etc.
- Additional costs due to duplicated activities, inefficient decision-making processes, tangled information systems, etc.
Key achievements
- Definition of guiding principles
- Selected managerial governance model: strategic steering
- Distinctions between:
- Core functions (mandatory and independent of the chosen governance model)
- Activities related to the selected strategic steering model
- Centralized strategic expertise (potentially decentralized)
- Shared expertise
- Steering functions (policy definition and managerial support)
- Shared transactional activities (shared services center)
- Decentralized activities
- Staff allocation among these different categories
- Definition of the target legal structure
- Support for the legal, social, tax, accounting, and information systems transformation, as well as behavioral and, ultimately, cultural transformation