How Wella got their divestment programme back on track to meet their TSA exit deadline

The programme of work

Transformation type: Global FMCG carve-out
bluewaveSELECT solution: M&A, Exclusive

The Stats

• 30+ accurate hires made across all five continents
• Quality candidate shortlists delivered within 24 hours
• 1:1 CV-to-interview ratio

The challenge:

• Wella Company is one of the world’s leading beauty companies, comprised of a family of iconic brands such as Wella Professionals, Clairol, Nioxin and ghd.
• Their global presence, in over 100 countries, provided a challenging landscape to carve out from parent company Coty.
• They needed highly specific regional knowledge, culture and language skills when building project teams.
• The divestment was being facilitated through the involvement of KKR, a global private equity firm, but were struggling to find SAP consultants that could handle the pragmatism needed to work as part of an interdependent, virtual, global team facing high-pressure timelines.
• The resources supplied by KKR led to regular character clashes, resulting in critical choke points on projects.
• They had reached a point where failure to secure the right resources in diverse geographic locations would put delivery of the entire divestment at risk.
• Previous experiences of KKR had shown that character clashes could be commonplace, resulting in critical choke points on projects.

The solution

• bluewaveSELECT was selected to deliver business critical SAP resources due to their reputation of not simply matching hard skills, but ensuring full consultant buy-in and culture fit.
• Once this had been proven, they chose to partner with bluewaveSELECT on an Exclusive basis.
• Knowing that SAP expertise alone would not cut it for this programme, bluewaveSELECT consulted with candidates in their network with a specific pedigree in M&A, divestments, and similarly commercially complex environments on well-known global projects such as GSK/Novartis, Unilever/ Upfield, and others in the FMCG/Pharma space.
• Having operated in this space over a number of years, bluewave is well known to these high-performing consultants and they were more than happy to engage with us to secure their next project – with Wella Company.

The Results

• Unlike many prior placements before engaging with bluewave, not one of the SAP resources introduced dropped out as a result of being overwhelmed by the pace and pressure of the programme or due to inadequate skills/experience.
• Thanks to the combination of bluewave’s deep SAP knowledge, personality matching, references and our unique screening process, Wella Company enjoyed continuity of resource throughout the programme.
• Most importantly, Wella Company got back on track to meet the TSA exit deadline.
• Given the success of this global programme, bluewaveSELECT have continued to supply Wella Company with SAP professionals on other SAP programmes.