Beauty brand owner Elida Beauty has created a scalable integration foundation to support global operations, automation and future AI capabilities following its separation from Unilever.
Elida Beauty has built an independent digital core with SnapLogic and Pace Integration, giving the owner of brands including St. Ives, VO5, TIGI and Q-tips a scalable technology foundation following its separation from Unilever.
The beauty business, which serves more than 300 million consumers annually, needed to create a standalone IT and operations environment without disrupting global trading. Its challenge was to replace the infrastructure inherited from a major consumer goods group while supporting a multi-market operating model that depends heavily on external partners.
Elida selected SnapLogic as the integration backbone for the new environment, with Pace Integration leading implementation. The platform connects multiple enterprise resource planning instances, third-party and fourth-party logistics providers, supply chain planning tools and data fabric platforms through a governed integration layer.
Rather than developing separate connections for every system and market, the project established reusable integration patterns. This approach was designed to accelerate deployment, enforce consistency and allow individual integrations to change as Elida’s operating requirements evolved.
Tim Bates, Head of IT Strategy and Applications, Elida Beauty, said the company had been building a new business from the ground up while continuing to operate globally. Previous integration programmes in large consumer packaged goods environments could take months to produce value, he added, but separation required a complete platform that could scale across markets from its first day.
“With SnapLogic and Pace, a lean team was able to design, test and evolve integrations at speed, delivering in weeks what would traditionally take quarters,” Bates said. “That acceleration proved truly transformative for the business.”
The architecture supports Elida’s distributed network of manufacturing, logistics and order-to-cash partners. Each organisation operates its own applications and data formats, creating a risk of fragmented processes, inconsistent information and manual intervention. A common integration layer standardises these exchanges while retaining the flexibility needed to accommodate regional differences.
Since going live, the platform has processed thousands of sales orders through more than 400 integration pipelines. Thirty scheduled tasks orchestrate critical workflows spanning ERP, supply chain planning and finance systems. Orders, shipments, invoices and planning data now move through the same integration environment, providing an operational backbone for Elida’s global supply chain.
Thomas Peach, Co-Founder, Pace Integration, said the combination of tight deadlines and changing requirements made real-time adaptation essential. Reusing integrations across regions helped the team meet separation milestones and left Elida with an architecture capable of supporting further growth.
Peach said the central technical difficulty was preserving business agility while connecting with inflexible enterprise systems. The team created a flexible layer that reduced constraints between applications, removed unnecessary complexity and kept critical data moving reliably.
Interactive, multidisciplinary design sessions allowed Pace, SnapLogic and Elida to turn emerging business needs into scalable integrations more quickly than a traditional gated delivery model would permit.
The platform was also designed to support continuing operational change after separation. Business and IT teams can modify integrations within hours instead of re-engineering complete systems, an important capability for a company whose processes and partner network are still developing.
SnapLogic also supports Elida’s data fabric and analytics strategy. Near-real-time operational information is delivered to cloud platforms used for forecasting, inventory visibility, trade promotion management and executive reporting. The governed flow creates what the companies describe as an AI-ready foundation for intelligent automation and agentic workflows.
Nick Pike, Vice President for EMEA, SnapLogic, said Elida’s project showed that corporate separation, modernisation and scaling could be pursued simultaneously. Making integration central to the digital core had converted a potentially complex disentanglement into a streamlined architecture, he said, while the unified data layer gave the business greater agility.
With its core systems operating independently, Elida is moving from foundational work towards simplification and automation. It aims to reduce manual processing while retaining a clean, low-code architecture that can respond to changing commercial demands without accumulating another generation of technical complexity.
The company is now examining how SnapLogic’s agentic capabilities could identify issues earlier, improve exception handling and automate processes including supplier onboarding. The intended result is not simply more automation, but fewer occasions when employees must chase information across disconnected systems before making operational decisions.
Bates said employees were not asked to buy into the technology itself. The programme was presented in terms of outcomes: completing the separation quickly, lowering development costs and adapting to changing requirements without rewriting thousands of lines of code. Confidence grew once teams saw the Pace developers identify problems and make changes to established pipelines within minutes.
“The biggest impact has been speed to market and flexibility,” Bates said. “Using SnapLogic, a relatively lean team was able to deploy integrations from fairly loose initial requirements and then evolve them as the business took shape.”
Future capacity was considered during the initial design. According to Peach, the integration layer can handle higher data volumes, support additional automation and introduce new capabilities without requiring fundamental re-architecture. It was also structured to protect security, performance and operational stability as more intelligent, AI-driven workflows are introduced.
For Elida, separation was therefore a starting point rather than the project’s final objective. The company now has a platform through which it can simplify core processes and extend automation across its international operation. Its exploration of AI agents is focused on allowing teams to spend less time locating and reconciling data and more time managing brands, partners and supply chain performance.
That flexibility is becoming increasingly important as consumer markets change.
