Nutrimetics was founded by an Australian couple in 1961 after they learned of the remote Himalayan village of Hunza, home to a long-lived people who credited their youthful skin appearance to using apricot kernel oil. From the beginning, Nutrimetics rapidly became one of Australia and New Zealand's leading direct-selling skincare companies and a world leader in developing skincare and colour cosmetics.
The company operates as a personalized direct-selling business that has created opportunities for more than 250,000 consultants in 12 countries worldwide. Now a part of the Sara Lee group of companies, Nutrimetics is at the forefront of product innovation and quality. Each Nutrimetics product is formulated with natural ingredients such as almond meal, rice bran oil, avocado oil, aloe vera, eucalyptus, cornflower, papaya extract, and jojoba oil.
The Nutrimetics International Product Supply Group (IPSG) manages product research and development. The Nutrimetics laboratories in Sydney and a Sara Lee Research and Development Centre in The Netherlands are dedicated to identifying new natural ingredients and to finding scientific improvements in skincare and cosmetics. As part of a global company, IPSG must carefully document everything it does during product development to meet the requirements of different regulatory agencies worldwide. The group develops between 100 and 120 new products a year, using a stringent product development process. Each product development effort can generate more than 1,000 documents—collected into ongoing project files called dossiers.
IPSG needed a centralised electronic-document storage solution to ensure that a product's dossier always contained the most recent version of a document. Among other items, the dossier contains a comprehensive and complete compilation of all technical and legal documents about a product. And IPSG needed a system that the company's researchers and executives could use to efficiently search for work the company had already performed in similar areas. As it was, much of the documentation was kept on paper, creating difficult-to-solve versioning problems and making the vast store of knowledge impractical to search.
Documents stored electronically tended to be dispersed across locations. Also, because no central repository existed, verifying the most recent document version or performing searches saddled product development and regulatory compliance with inefficiencies.
The Solution
Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner livePoint, the Nutrimetics International Product Supply Group deployed Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, running on the Standard Edition of the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, the foundation of the Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is the Web-based collaboration solution of Windows Server 2003. Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 is used for the data store.