The modern fashion industry, with its swiftness to react to trends inspired by customers as its main feature, demands a very wide, diverse, dynamic and efficient chain of values. Thousands of production sites and hundreds of thousands of professionals, working together and involved in the manufacturing of the collection yearly displayed in our stores. This complex model and the challenge of a perfect implementation of preventive measures put forward by Inditex imply the need of a solid quality control system to fully guarantee our commitment to customers. Picking programme is Inditex response to this need.

This programme has been drafted bearing in mind Inditex’ s specific business model with very different locations for its manufacturing, logistics adapted to short-deadline production, transport and distribution and a strong commitment to fulfil safety and health standards.

This programme is scheduled in four stages:

• Previous assessment of potential risks for each item.
• Sampling of the production.
• Analysis and testing in certified analytical labs to check that items comply with CTW and STW regulations.
• Detailed study of the outcome in order to establish its approval, rejection or specific changes in order to satisfy CTW and STW.

Inditex actively cooperates with several companies and entities supplying analysis and testing services, in order to build an appropriate lab network to back up the Picking programme. The homogeneity and quality of the results from different laboratories belonging to several organizations is ensured by an ongoing development of the programme. Testing to the tested, by Inditex, is a programme that monitors the quality of the testing procedures and the qualification of technicians in the laboratories.

Furthermore, in order to boost the efficiency and performance of the programme, Inditex has developed in cooperation with the University of Santiago de Compostela statistical tools for Big Data analytics which enables:

• the detection of manufacturing technologies which may pose a risk of breach of CTW (Manufacturing Epidemiology)
• a breakdown of the manufacturing risks depending on the garment components
• the optimal use of resources destined to Picking programme, focusing on items or components that represent a higher potential risk

These statistical tools, together with a positive evolution of suppliers towards a better compliance of the product safety and health for Inditex production, have contributed to determine the number of required analysis to guarantee a compliance with these policies. In this regard, the former purely reactive monitoring system has progressively become a strategy combining the Picking programme with other proactive programmes (Ready to Manufacture and The List, by Inditex), which include monitoring measures throughout the whole production process.