Groupe Rocher’s sustainability strategy blooms with Boomi integration

With the number of systems in any business stack multiplying, firms can quickly find their data is siloed and processes becoming bottlenecked, driving up inefficiencies, costs, and ultimately impacting a firm’s wider goals, such as its sustainability efforts. Plus, when working with many custom APIs, the maintenance workload takes up large amounts of time and resources. 

The eco-friendly, plant-based beauty and lifestyle retailer, Groupe Rocher, found this very problem emerging in its own software ecosystem. A French, family-owned business with a reach of over 100 countries, the group has more than 13,500 employees across its nine global brands and brings in annual revenues of €2.5bn. 

Keeping a conscious eye on its sustainability goals and its mission to “reconnect people to nature”, Groupe Rocher carefully controls the lifecycle of its nine cosmetics, clothing, and home embellishment sector brands, and manages processes from product manufacture right through to supply and distribution to over 50 million customers across wholesale, retail, and digital channels.

As the business continued to seek expansion, it needed to modernise its technology landscape to keep up with demand, unify its diverse business operations, and deliver a better customer experience, while also simplifying processes and enabling cost-savings across the board.

Seeking sustainable infrastructure

Over its 60 years of operations, the business has racked up a towering stack of legacy tools across its various brands. For its key systems, SAP S/4HANA sits at Groupe Rocher’s core, with Salesforce CRM and Shopify also playing critical roles in its ecosystem. A 700-strong team of in-house IT staff and external consultants managed Rocher’s infrastructure, with multiple integration platforms and considerable time and resources lost to ongoing custom coding. 

Recognising the need to integrate its widespread applications and data sources more effectively, and also wishing to accelerate its migration to Google Cloud for its omnichannel customer experiences, the retail group partnered with Boomi, the integration as-a-service platform provider, and technology consultancy Capgemini. 

Alternative iPaaS vendors such as MuleSoft, SAP, and API management suppliers were also evaluated as part of the solution selection process but, for the retail group, Boomi was its first choice given its vendor-agnostic approach, easy-use low-code, proprietary SAP connector technology, and cloud-native integration platform. With five dedicated SAP connectors and an extensive history of other SAP/Salesforce user projects, the Boomi integration platform promised to deliver the vital expertise and technology for Groupe Rocher’s core requirements. 

Integration for a bigger business and a smaller carbon footprint 

Now, the Boomi platform is part of Groupe Rocher’s Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP), which includes API management and Solace middleware. 

Boomi’s low-code capabilities helped to train teams and develop flows more easily, speeding up productivity in just two weeks after implementation. Supply chain efficiency has improved, with a faster time to market thanks to the already 300 workflows developed for Rocher’s needs. 

For its omnichannel operations, Rocher has reported it has been able to provide a smoother experience, with connections across various retail, ecommerce and social media touchpoints. With increased scalability and reusable workflows across different applications and brands, Rocher has been able to eliminate rework, save on costs, increase productivity and ultimately, expand the business on a secure footing.

“With Boomi, we’ve streamlined our operations, improved customer experience, and ensured our IT investments are aligned with our sustainability goals,” said Stanislas Duthier, Chief Information Systems Officer, Groupe Rocher. 

Checking in with the group two years after its initial go-live with Boomi, the firm has been able to keep its infrastructure much more streamlined and sustainable, with the flexibility to adapt the platform as the business continues to develop. 

Next up, the group will be looking at the latest Boomi innovations ongoing to see how emerging technologies can further aid its infrastructure sustainability and efficiency efforts. 

It didn’t take Boomi long – having announced at its 2024 World Tour that more AI agent tools will be embedded into the platform as part of Boomi’s wider Enterprise AI Management (EAIM) software mission, building over the next five years. 

Baptiste Stey, IT-integration product manager, Groupe Rocher, is eager to get started, and commented: “We are future-ready with Boomi, and keen to explore its AI capabilities to further enhance our integration processes.” 

With a sustainable IT infrastructure that optimised supply chain efficiencies, delivered omnichannel customer experiences, and reduced costs and use of resources, Groupe Rocher could successfully align its software innovation efforts with its mission to reduce its carbon footprint.