Albea Cosmetics turns around 73% contracts within 24 hours

Summary

Albéa Cosmetics is a leading company in the packaging solutions industry, particularly for beauty, personal care, skincare, fragrance, and oral care products. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in France, Albéa Cosmetics operates 34 manufacturing sites across Europe, North and South America, China, and Asia. Albéa Cosmetics provides a wide range of packaging solutions, including tubes, cosmetic rigid packaging, and dispensing systems.

They leverage Signeasy across multiple departments such as HR, Payroll, Finance, Engineering, Quality, New Product Development, and Logistics. Before using Signeasy, they encountered significant challenges with paper-based processes that were time-consuming and costly.

After adopting Signeasy, Albea Cosmetics streamlined the creation of frequently used documents such as contracts, invoices, and reports. This led to faster processing, reduced costs, and improved compliance across departments.

Albea Cosmetics: Packaging cosmetics you use every day

Albea Cosmetics is the world leader in beauty packaging, crafting containers like tubes, lipsticks, mascaras, and skincare jars for various makeup and skincare essentials. From drugstore brands like Maybelline, L'oreal, and Garnier to luxury labels like Armani, Christian Dior, Givenchy, and Guerlian, Albea’s packaging ensures that beauty products remain safe and stylish for all their customers.

Committed to quality and innovation, Albea ensures their packaging not only meets the highest standards but also elevates the user experience. Their products are both functional and aesthetically pleasing, meeting the diverse needs of consumers and brands around the globe. 

Albea has a central manufacturing plant in Mexico that works closely with three other locations to build products. This network keeps their quality high and production speedy, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve in the beauty industry.

However, this also means managing a vast array of documents between different departments — like supplier contracts, regulatory approvals, product specifications, and internal policies — which can be challenging. 

That’s why Albea turned to Signeasy, leveraging digital contract management to streamline their document workflows. This shift has boosted their productivity and efficiency, allowing them to focus on what they do best: setting the standards in beauty packaging. 

We spoke with Erika Ramirez, the HR Coordinator at Albea Cosmetics, to better understand how they did this. Her extensive experience as a Signeasy power user offered us insights into how they’re leveraging the contract management platform to streamline their document workflows.

The drawbacks of manual contract management 

Before adopting Signeasy, Albea Cosmetics struggled with a slow and tedious process for signing contracts. This manual method caused significant delays, impacting important business activities like project or product kick-offs, supplier agreements, and customer contracts. It affected the overall efficiency.

Contracts need to be signed by multiple departments, including procurement, legal, finance, and sales, and often involve locations like their manufacturing units in Mexico and headquarters in Paris. 

Coordinating across different time zones and offices added days or even weeks to the process. Juggling these signatures and approvals was often a logistical nightmare. Moreover, each department had its requirements and timelines, leading to multiple follow-ups and reminders. 

Erika sums up the situation perfectly, “The manual process of signing contracts was very cumbersome and time-consuming. We had to wait for days, sometimes weeks, for all the necessary signatures to be collected. These delays affected our critical business processes.”

Important documents could easily get misplaced or stuck on someone’s desk, causing even more holdups. Handling urgent document signings was particularly challenging. When a crucial contract needed immediate attention, the manual process made it difficult.

Turning tedious tasks into seamless operations

Signeasy streamlined Albea’s document preparation and management processes, simplifying how they handle everything from supplier contracts to internal policies. 

Managing time-sensitive document signings

Signeasy’s contract management software allows Albea Cosmetics to manage document signings swiftly and handle multiple documents simultaneously. 

Erika uses the Envelopes feature to add multiple documents to a single signature request. Now, managers receive a bundle of up to 10 files and can sign them all in one go instead of opening and signing each separately. This saves significant time and ensures they never miss a signature, solving a major challenge they previously faced.

Another challenge she faced was constant delays in getting documents signed on time. Managers were often away from their desks, spending time at the manufacturing unit, which slowed down projects.

With Signeasy’s automated reminders and real-time tracking features, Erika could ensure managers were promptly notified to sign and gain complete visibility into where the document was stuck.

“Signeasy makes it so easy to handle urgent document signings. Managing multiple documents for different employees and dealing with reminders and attachment limits has also become very convenient,” Erika explains.

Faster signatures and authorization

Speed is crucial in almost any industry, and Signeasy has made a difference in this aspect of Albea's approval processes. 

Getting documents signed used to be a lengthy process, especially when signatures were needed from multiple people. Erika recalls documents needing anywhere from two to six signatures, often involving in-person meetings or endless email exchanges. Now, with Signeasy, Erika can send signature requests to all necessary signers at once with a single click. This streamlined process saves a lot of time and closes documents much faster, without the need for separate emails.

With Signeasy, Albea has not only simplified the signing process but also centralized storage, making the handling of contracts nearly effortless. 

“Now, there’s no need for printouts as almost all documents live on Signeasy. If I need to revisit a contract from two years ago, I just search on Signeasy,” Erika explains. 

This approach clears up physical space and streamlines access to past agreements whenever needed.

By automating such redundancies, the result is a more agile, responsive, and efficient organization capable of meeting the dynamic needs of the beauty industry.

Quick turnarounds and streamlined operations

Signeasy’s impact on Albea’s operational processes is undeniable. Their document processing is swift, with 32% of transactions completed within the first hour! This translates to overall efficiency, with 73% of transactions finalized within a single day.  

Erika summarizes the impact perfectly:

“Signeasy has halved our document approval turnaround time, which is critical for meeting tight deadlines.” 

These impressive results showcase how Signeasy has streamlined Albea’s operations, driving efficiency and speed.