Brand name and private label manufacturers of home and personal care products, such as cleaning solutions, detergents, paper products, cosmetics, baby care, and skin care, contend with conflicting challenges. On one hand, they need to create new and update existing products and packaging. On the other hand, they have to develop innovative, new products in the face of demands from regulatory compliance, sustainability, supply chain complexity, industrial productivity, rising commodity costs, and changing customer needs.

Consumers have become increasingly health conscious, and thus strive to not only eat healthy foods and exercise regularly, but augment that discipline with high-quality, safe, sustainably made (“green”) personal care products. Interestingly, however, they not only look to classic brand names, they also look to private label products from large retailers, largely a result of the recent economic malaise. Consumers need to manage to a budget, but they want their hair, skin and body to look good, so they do not want to sacrifice quality. Increasingly, you see private label manufacturers building their own product development teams, and really focusing on changing the perception of private label products as low-priced, low-quality, “good-enough” products to a perception of lower priced, but still high-quality products. However, consumers still also consider the most respected brand names in the personal care and cosmetics market when they are shopping. So the challenge for both brand and private label manufacturers is winning on the shelf — at the moment when consumers have a store brand bottle of shampoo in one hand, and a national brand in the other — whether the competition is driven by price, merchandising, packaging or product.

This dynamic also exists in the home care side of the market. When consumers clean their homes or clothing, they don't want to use chemicals that may be harmful to their children or themselves. They want to know whether the cleaning product was formulated only with natural, organic, compliant ingredients. They are not averse to changing brand loyalty to a store brand, if it meets their requirements at a reasonable price. But when a consumer is shopping, there is a small window of time to communicate how sustainably made and high-quality your product is, which speaks to the need for the close interplay of your research and development (R&D), supply chain, packaging design and artwork management.

The competitive dynamic between brand and private label manufacturers, and the expanding number of choices that consumers have in the home and personal care market, drives the need for rapid, efficient, sustainable new product formulation, innovative packaging, and supply chain excellence. Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the system designed to bring all these pieces together. Siemens PLM Software solutions enable decision support and rapid time-to-market for home and personal care manufacturers, including:

• Personal and home care product development
• Cosmetic product development/formulation
• Packaging design
• Supply chain collaboration
• Product launch

PLM provides a unified home and personal care product development foundation so that you are not only developing compliant, sustainably made products that make your customers look and feel their best, but you are also depicting and communicating the information about your product in a way that compels consumers to buy. With PLM, manufacturers can be assured that their products that beautify the home and person always meet customer needs at the right time.