Dermalogica looks forward to soothing balm of ADP freedom

Spring 2006: Rapid growth averaging 30% a year demands efficient employee management processes for world’s most demanding skin care professionals.

Dermalogica, the fast growing international skin care company, has signed an agreement with ADP to manage its payroll and employee management processes in the UK. Its payroll processes, currently run by a bureau service provider, will be switched over to ADP freedom in June 2006. Established in 1986 out of the International Dermal Institute in America, Dermalogica researches, develops and distributes skin care products exclusively to professionally qualified skin care professionals around the world. Its rapidly growing UK operation now employs 220 people working across eight sites. Seven of the locations are training schools providing independent post graduate courses for skin care professionals, and the eighth is the company’s European distribution centre for Dermalogica products. The products are developed, tested and manufactured in the USA and then shipped onto fourteen countries from the UK centre.

A highly innovative company, Dermalogica’s UK organisation is a passionate early adopter of the latest technologies to help it manage its business processes more efficiently. Jenni Mansell, Finance Manager at Dermalogica for the past five years said of ADP freedom, “We liked the look of ADP freedom because of its ability to let us manage payroll and HR through the web. We had already implemented an on-line expenses system and we are very comfortable training ourselves on new systems. When it comes to using new technology, change management is not a problem for us.”

Jenni first investigated ADP freedom when the service was in its very early development phase. “We’ve waited a year or so for the system to mature and we are now ready to switch to ADP freedom,” she says. Dermalogica plans to use all of ADP freedom’s rich functionality which includes employee selfservice capabilities allowing staff to view their own absence records, change personal details, and request/track their own holiday entitlements. ADP freedom uses a single database for both HR and payroll and, says Jenni, “The biggest benefit to us will be a complete end to duplication of data input.”

Further benefits for Dermalogica UK will be the ability to switch to fully automated BACS payments. “At the moment we use coded forms from the bank, which we have to manually process each month. Along with many other manual processes associated with payroll, ADP freedom will automate almost everything that we do, leaving us time to concentrate on managing the business.”

With high growth Jenni says that “life at Dermalogica is busy. ADP freedom makes its next HR module release available in July and we plan to bring this on board early next year.”