A significant regulatory change is on the horizon, and its impacts on your organization remain unclear. The urgency to adapt is becoming imperative.
Your company has just been notified about this upcoming regulatory shift, and the pressure is mounting. This new, critical project adds to your team’s already demanding workloads. Planned initiatives are put on hold, and the team is now dedicating countless hours to understanding the implications of the change. They are sifting through email inboxes, policy documents, and operational procedures to identify areas that need immediate attention and revision.
As the deadline for compliance approaches, late nights turn into all-nighters. Someone wonders aloud whether regulatory changes are this stressful for every company — or just theirs. Rest assured, it’s not just your company. Across industries worldwide, organizations are facing similar pressures, provoking some big questions:
- How can we maintain compliance, manage product and advertising claims, and integrate new criteria such as sustainability, even as we bring more new products into more markets?
- How can we reduce time to market while avoiding employee burnout?
In confronting these challenges, forward-thinking companies are discovering that unified, cloud-based software can address their most pressing issues and unleash their teams’ potential.
Here are four of the biggest challenges facing the personal care and beauty industry today:
Issue #1: Running as Fast as the Market
One of the key problems faced by the personal care and beauty industry is that the market can change on a dime — which means that teams across global brands are feeling the pressure to reduce time to market.
The introduction of China's Cosmetics Supervision and Administration Regulation (CSAR) has mandated comprehensive safety assessments and stringent documentation for product registration and filing. Similarly, the U.S. Modernization of Cosmetic Regulation Act (MoCRA) has expanded the FDA’s oversight, requiring new safety standards, mandatory recall authority, and extensive record-keeping. In the European Union, the new ‘fragrance allergens’ labeling regulation expands the list to 80+ allergens to be labeled, enhancing consumer safety but adding complexity to compliance processes. These regulations require substantial investment in compliance infrastructure and expertise, necessitating detailed tracking, testing, and documentation to meet diverse international standards
But research and development (R&D) in the personal care and beauty industry takes time. Established global brands are held back by lengthy product development, and launch processes can take anywhere from 12 months to three years. The product journey — from development to testing to sourcing to packaging — involves more and more complex collaborations between multiple departments and outside partners. To adequately address broad considerations such as safety or sustainability, experts must be embedded from the first day of the project. It can take hundreds of processes and interactions just to get one new product onto the shelf.
As a result, companies are increasingly taking more risks, endorsing more pressure, and revamping their brand portfolios to save market shares against more nimble competitors.
Issue #2: Managing Product Claims
Personal care and beauty companies can also run into hot water if they can’t back up their claims about what their products do or what their products are made of with hard data — or worse if those claims are proven wrong.
Why is claims substantiation one of the main challenges facing this industry?
For one, there is increased consumer demand for environmentally friendly products, but the industry currently does not have a formal definition of “Green.” As a result, many companies struggle with making claims that are substantiated by scientific evidence.
On March 12, 2024, the European Parliament voted in favor of the Green Claims Directive. European Parliament adopts its position on Green Claims Directive | Food Packaging Forum. Companies are mandated to provide evidence supporting environmental assertions such as “biodegradable,” “less polluting,” “water saving,” or “bio-based content.”
Karen Yarussi-King, president of Global Regulatory Associates, advised in Beauty Independent that "brands should go through every claim with a fine-tooth comb to ensure they can back each one up. She cautioned for example that "brands tend to make claims not in alignment with the ingredients in their formulas.
And when you see daily posts on misleading sustainability claims (Source Green), companies are much more exposed to authorities inspection and brand reputation damage.
Many personal care and beauty companies do not keep product information in a centralized location, meaning that it can become a logistical nightmare for teams to find out what claims can be used and track down the most up-to-date claims from the relevant departments.
Issue #3: Ensuring Global Quality and Compliance
As a number of personal care and beauty companies have learned, research and development of high-quality products in the personal care and beauty industry is no easy feat. On top of being effective, these products also need to be compliant with numerous levels of regulations before entering each unique market.
Compliance is one of the most significant problems for the personal care industry because countries around the world are constantly introducing new regulations and refining existing ones. Failing to comply can result in company penalties and significantly damage their reputation with the public. It can be nearly impossible to regain customer trust once it’s lost.
Ensuring regulatory compliance is a complex, resource-intensive step in the product journey. Global brands often have to release dozens of products, packaging, and claim variations to meet different regulatory requirements. Tracking all this information is challenging and can complicate a team’s efforts to quickly launch a product in multiple markets. And when a change occurs, it can impact thousands of products, leading to varied consequences in local markets.
To further complicate matters, most personal care and beauty companies still manage these essential processes and content externally through physical or on-site solutions. This is an inefficient use of time and resources, leading to redundancies such as version control issues and missed opportunities for content reuse, not to mention increased compliance risks.
Issue #4: Attracting and Retaining Top Talent
Many personal care and beauty companies manage their business processes and content the same way they did 10 years ago: with on-site solutions like spreadsheets, emails, and non-future-proof solutions. If you’re lucky, maybe your company has upgraded to using Sharepoint or Google Drive.
At a time when you can order practically anything from your smartphone with just a few taps of your finger, it’s tragic that personal care teams are still expected to produce strong results and faster with such outdated technologies. This is creating needless inefficiencies, putting companies at greater risk of non-compliance, and causing endless employee frustrations.
Consider this: How long would it take for your team to conduct even a relatively simple internal audit? How many systems, inboxes, and files would your teams need to trawl through just to pull together the necessary documentation? Could (and should) that time be dedicated to other, profit-generating business needs instead?
Given these inefficiencies, it’s no wonder that regulatory and quality departments across global personal care brands struggle with high rates of employee turnover, as their leadership is not giving teams the tools to succeed.
How Global Personal Care and Beauty Industry Leaders are Keeping Pace: Unified, Cloud-based Software
What if everything related to a product — from ideation to testing, to branding and manufacturing, all the way to post-purchase support — could be accessed in one secure place? And what if finding the latest, approved version of your brand’s content was as easy as doing a quick digital search?
By investing in unified cloud-based software for managing processes and data, you’d be able to streamline your process in the following ways:
- Advance all relevant content together — through auditable, secure digital processes that make it easy to collaborate across departments and with outside partners
- Unified data model provides compliance verification at each step of the product journey
- Track content requirements for each region and quickly identify the most recent content versions from each team
- Access a global dashboard showing the real-time status of active projects
- Work the way and at the pace you do in the other areas of your life
Find the Compliance software solution that’s right for your business
With unified cloud-based software such as Veeva QualityOne, Veeva RegulatoryOne, and Veeva Claims, you’ll no longer have to dig through your email inbox to find what you hope is the latest version of product claims, registration records, audits, or package designs. Instead, you and your teams will share a common resource for managing regulatory, claims, and quality processes and content. All the information you’ll need for an authority request, audit or to proceed with a change will be automatically tracked and easily accessed. Moreover, you can set up notifications alerting you to discrepancies in near real-time, enabling you to run internal audits anytime on demand.
Veeva’s unified cloud-based software solutions help centralize your process, setting your teams up to work more efficiently, with increased reliability to target and focus on your top business priorities. Veeva solutions also provide you with capabilities to constantly and easily adapt to a changing world to make sure to keep pace with the market dynamics.
But how do you get the rest of your company on board with a new solution? Where’s the best place to start?
Many of your peers have tackled similar challenges before. See the solution they’ve discovered to bring products to market faster, vault over compliance hurdles, and keep their employees happy.
Learn more about Veeva’s regulatory, quality, and claims management solutions for the personal care and beauty industry.
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