Executive Summary

L’Oréal, the world’s largest and leading cosmetics company, hosted the Open Manufacturing America (OMA) and Contract Manufacturer (CM) Quality Day with the help of Whova’s all-in-one event management software.

L’Oréal’s top priority is to offer consumer products of the best possible quality. They need to ensure that each individual product produced internally or at Contract Manufacturers meets the highest quality standards of every country, distribution channel, and L’Oréal brand. The internal company event connected over 100 attendees, including many prominent L’Oréal Contract Manufacturers from America, China, and Korea. The L’Oréal organizers fostered exceptional communication and exchanges and maximized attendee engagement with Whova’s assistance. 

About L’Oréal Open Manufacturing America (OMA) CM Quality Day

L’Oréal has devoted itself to beauty for over 100 years. The group has a unique international portfolio of 35 diverse and complementary brands in over 150 countries.

As the world’s leading beauty company, L’Oréal is present across all distribution networks: mass market, department stores, pharmacies and drug stores, hair salons, travel retail, branded retail and e-commerce. They are passionate about helping hundreds of millions of people feel their best beautiful selves through ethical and quality L’Oréal products. 

L’Oréal’s Open Manufacturing America (OMA) Department aims at providing the highest level of quality and compliance to applicable standards, a competitive cost, the latest in innovation, and excellent service to our customers by partnering and executing business plan with our Contract Manufacturers. Their event upheld themes of partnership, compliance, consumer centricity, best practices, agility, and continuous improvement.

Challenges

• Communicating between teams 

With many manufacturing and product quality teams present, the organizers needed an efficient communication system that made it easy for team members and individual attendees to chat and share information.

• Coordinating event logistics 

The L’Oréal organizers needed to effectively organize a packed agenda and help attendees navigate various event logistics. They wanted to provide this information to attendees in a comprehensive online platform. 

• Checking in attendees 

Checking in attendees can be a hassle at in-person events; the organizers needed a quick and easy way to check-in attendees while also providing them with essential name badges.

• Networking at the event

The L’Oréal event was intended to promote the idea of partnerships, so it was essential members had opportunities to connect and engage with each other through discussions and meetups. 

Solutions

• Communicating through announcements in the app

The announcement feature enabled the L’Oréal organizers to effortlessly contact all attendees or specific groups of attendees. Besides sending feedback forms and surveys, they also reminded attendees to fill out dietary restriction forms and download power points. Whova’s system preserves all announcements under the discussion topic “Organizer Announcements” in the Community Board, where attendees could effortlessly access at any point during the event. 

Attendees could also contact the organizers, speakers, or fellow attendees by searching their names or titles in the app’s comprehensive list of attendees. They could send direct messages to individual attendees or create group chats with fellow team members. 

The organizers posted many announcements to easily communicate with attendees

• Organizing session logistics with the virtual agenda

Whova’s online agenda builder made it easy for the organizers to upload session information automatically generated into a sleek agenda on the Whova app. They effortlessly separated workshops from other sessions and included the session location, time, and speaker information. 

Attendees could easily add or remove sessions they were interested in to create a personalized agenda in the app.

Besides creating a polished agenda, the organizers effortlessly uploaded all necessary session documents into the resources section on the app where attendees could quickly access the PDFs. 

Attendees could add sessions to their personal agendas

• Navigating event logistics through the app

By logging onto Whova’s app, attendees had easy access to event resources, including parking information, hotel booking links, wifi passwords, and more.

In addition to accessing necessary event information, Whova’s virtual floor map helped attendees find central locations and specific conference rooms the organizers had tagged in advance. 

• Checking attendees in through Whova

The L’Oréal organizers took advantage of Whova’s seamless attendee check-in feature to speed up the check-in process. 

After checking in guests on the automatically generated attendee lists, the organizers printed attendee name badges by simply clicking a button on the list next to each attendees’ name. The name badges were easily customizable from Whova’s many premade templates and allowed organizers to include attendee names, affiliations, and event branding. 

• Networking through Whova’s Community Board

Whova’s Community Board, a popular online chat designed to help attendees network, inspired many conversations about industry topics. Through the board, attendees posted online discussion topics of their choosing or added outstanding articles to the “Article Sharing” topic. 

Many attendees used the ice-breaker feature to introduce themselves in fun and engaging ways. Besides posting a brief personal introduction, attendees could also share their favorite sports or travel destinations. In addition to fostering excellent communication, attendees posted over 70 photos on the Community Board. They shared selfies, presentation slides, and pictures about their industry. Attendees could like and comment on the images shared in the app and then also post them directly to their social media accounts. 

The icebreakers were a fun way for attendees to introduce themselves in the Community Board