L'Oreal turns to Talend to help power research and innovation

Talend has announced L'Oreal is utilising the company's technology to power the Research and Innovation (R-I) department's data lake in a private IaaS environment on Microsoft Azure.

With Talend, L'Oreal's R-I teams can ingest its variety of scientific, IoT, and marketing data to power analysis and creation of new products, the company says.

L'Oreal IS experimental data intelligence Philippe Benivay says, "In the globalised beauty industry, L'Oreal must innovate ever faster to meet the desires and needs of customers looking for new products and services that respect their bodies and the environment. Our vision is to deliver services to our businesses that they have not yet considered."

"Data and artificial intelligence allow us to move faster to create cosmetic products that meet the infinite diversity of beauty needs and desires of consumers around the world. Talend, in our private cloud environment on Microsoft Azure, helps us transform R-I into a value-added service that can leverage all research data to deliver the best in cosmetic innovation in terms of quality, efficiency, and safety," says Benivay.

L'Oreal's R-I division deploys its teams around the world to imagine and create new products. Every year its development teams introduce several thousand formulas as the result of an ongoing dialogue between science and marketing.

To bring new products to market, R-I must be able to compile all data related to the characterisation and physicochemical definition of formulas and raw materials, and the perceived performance of products by consumers in real conditions and in real-time, the company says.

To have a more accurate view of formulas and product perception, L'Oreal wanted to capitalise and centralise all research data of various natures and formats.

This need to integrate multiple data sources led to the selection of Talend and the implementation of a new data lake in a private IaaS on Microsoft Azure.

By deploying Talend Data Fabric, L'Oreal is able to connect all types of databases, structured laboratory data, and heterogeneous and sometimes raw data sources, such as robotic measurement or images data.

Talend's solution allows L'Oreal to incorporate intelligent algorithms directly into data integration flows in the form of APIs. The data lake enables the R-I to consolidate and prepare data to facilitate researchers' analyses and help them base their conclusions on reliable, high-quality data. The data lake processes 50 million pieces of data per day.

With Talend, data is available in real-time, and the data lake is refreshed several times a day, which allows more precise management of sensitive research projects, the company says.

The first operational use case developed for the finance department was on the economic management of research. The new dashboards managed all KPIs for research-related activities and associated costs, such as tests for certification and qualification.

Since the commissioning of the data lake, use cases have multiplied at L'Oreal, according to the company.

To meet business needs, the company has deployed data marts on-demand to produce even more knowledge on many subjects, such as the microbiome (micro-organisms living inside and on the surface of the epidermis) or the exposome (the effect of pollution on the skin).

Toxicologists have simplified autonomous and rapid access to quality data to support the development of new formulas. For consumer evaluations, all the videos that will be acquired during testing sessions to evaluate the effectiveness of the products are integrated into the data lake, allowing for almost instantaneous image processing and manipulation.

Talend SVP of products Ciaran Dynes says, "Research teams must base their analyses and conclusions on trusted data that is accessible in real-time.

"L'Oreal's R-I team uses data and artificial intelligence not only to help them develop new and increasingly innovative products, but also to inform other departments throughout the company. At Talend, we are proud to be able to participate in the innovation of the world leader in beauty.