SUCCESS STORY

Since 1970, Sephora has been a visionary beauty-retail concept. Sephora’s unique, open-sell environment features an ever-increasing amount of classic and emerging brands across a broad range of product categories, including skincare, color, fragrance, body, smile care and hair care, in addition to Sephora’s own private label.

Not only a beauty trailblazer, Sephora is a workplace game-changer as well. Edgar Sanchez, Manager of Corporate Facilities at Sephora, is responsible for overseeing 10 floors, two buildings, 1,500 people and over 300,000 square feet of space. As Sephora sees growth, Edgar must account for that growth on each floor, among 40 different departments. A huge part of Edgar’s job is space planning and move management. He also has to keep up with the kitchens, office supplies, storage, meeting arrangements, conference room amenities and bookings and more.

The largest pain point for Edgar was managing moves. Employees were moving and departments were changing floors constantly with not a lot of advanced notice or planning. In November 2015, Edgar was preparing for a 400-person move without the right support from a proper software platform. At the time, Edgar was using AutoCAD, Big Sky, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to manage his move. However, Big Sky is designed to manage retail environments, rather than corporate facilities. The software was hard to use, had too many steps and Edgar didn’t have enough time to manage the onerous software.

In need of a solution before the big move, Edgar went on the hunt for a solution that would support the constant employee moves within Sephora, as well as map out the upcoming move and show predictive scenarios for better planning. While Edgar reviewed and considered several FM Systems, he ultimately decided to move forward with iOFFICE.

IMPLEMENTATION

• The biggest factors in choosing iOFFICE were its clean, simple user interface, ease of use and flexibility.
• Currently, Sephora is using the Space Management module, which allows Edgar to visualize floor plans online, make moves in minutes and easily plan for future moves. With this module, Edgar can effectively create move scenarios that will dramatically shorten the move time.
• Equally important, Sephora can now run reports to manage its CRE portfolio, identify usage patterns and plan for the future.

RESULTS

Since October 2015, Sephora has seen a significant improvement in its moves. Thanks to iOFFICE, its November 2015 move went off without a hitch. In the past, it would have taken Edgar two to three months to plan a move, but now it only took him one week. For Sephora, the greatest benefits of working with iOFFICE are creating organized and clear floor maps, ease of moves and the increased productivity of the FM team.

FUTURE

In the future, Sephora plans on using the Service Request module. Since Edgar manages more than 1,500 people, tracking thousands of requests over email can be overwhelming. Edgar also intends to expand Sephora’s use of iOFFICE’s reporting feature. Today, Edgar can break down the workforce ratio of full-time vs. contractor employees, create floor associations and seat assignments. Over time, iOFFICE’s reports can offer insights on usage and utilization, and help Edgar plan future scenarios for all types of Sephora’s employees.