Elida Beauty

The organisation

Elida Beauty is home to more than twenty heritage personal care and beauty brands, including Q-Tips, Caress, Timotei, TIGI, Impulse and Alberto Balsam, carved out from Unilever in 2024 following its acquisition by Boston-based private equity firm Yellow Wood Partners. Generating around €0.8 billion in turnover, the newly independent company inherited category-leading brands but had to rapidly build the standalone commercial and technology capabilities that Unilever's shared infrastructure had previously provided.

The challenge

As a newly separated business, Elida Beauty's sales, promo planning and pricing teams were managing trade promotions through disconnected Excel workbooks and email-based handoffs, a legacy of the carve-out rather than a purpose-built process. There was no single source of truth, version control was manual, and every pricing or promo adjustment involved back-and-forth emails between sales, promo planning and finance, with no audit trail and no real-time visibility into margin impact. Product and pricing data lived in Microsoft Business Central, but keeping it aligned with the Excel-driven workflow was slow, error-prone and entirely manual, leaving leadership without a consolidated view of trade spend.

The solution

The delivery team was engaged under a product development model, owning full delivery from requirements through go-live, under a commercial framework that made a fast-moving, newly divested business comfortable scaling a strategic Microsoft Power Platform programme. The engagement began with structured discovery: the team worked directly with Elida Beauty's sales and promo planning functions to map the trade promotion workflow end to end, from sales planning through promo execution to customer pricing, ensuring the build reflected real user needs rather than assumptions. In parallel, the team worked with Elida Beauty's IT function to design an integration architecture delivering near real-time synchronisation between the new application and Business Central, removing manual exports entirely. The result is a unified, production-grade application spanning three core commercial workflows: Sales Planning, Promo Planning and Customer Pricing, built on Power Apps with Power Automate orchestrating what were previously email-based handoffs, Power Platform Dataflows keeping product and pricing data current, and Power BI giving leadership consolidated reporting for the first time. Every workflow is fully aligned with Elida Beauty's existing Microsoft investment, with no additional third-party licensing.

How we ran it

1. 01

   Discover

   Mapped the full trade promotion workflow with sales and promo planning teams, from planning through pricing, to design around real user needs.

2. 02

   Architect the integration

   Worked with Elida Beauty's IT function to design near real-time synchronisation between the new application and Business Central.

3. 03

   Build the platform

   Delivered Sales Planning, Promo Planning and Customer Pricing as one unified Power Apps solution with Power Automate orchestration.

4. 04

   Deliver visibility

   Layered Power BI reporting across every workflow, giving leadership consolidated, real-time visibility into trade spend.

The result

Within months of go-live, Elida Beauty had a single, governed home for trade promotion management where none had existed before. Excel is no longer the operational backbone of the process, email handoffs have been replaced by system-driven workflows with full audit trails, and pricing data now synchronises with Business Central in near real time. Leadership has real-time visibility into trade spend for the first time since the carve-out, and the platform is built to scale as further brands and markets onboard.