Innovation, vital for transformation
Innovation, vital to our ability to transform, is in our DNA. We are striving to be more creative and efficient and to offer innovative experiences that satisfy our customers, and so strengthen their bond with us. Innovation is what drives those goals. It is present in everything we do and has a clear origin and destination: our customers.
Framed by that premise, our entire innovation thrust is aimed at a dual objective: improving the shopping experience across our sales channels while fully addressing the challenges our customers are bringing to us in relation to the efficiency of our processes and how we care for people and the planet.
As a result, our innovation vision is articulated around two approaches: the first is pragmatic, designed to generate rapid and effective solutions; the second is forward-looking, oriented around sustainability. Both perspectives keep us ahead of our customers’ needs and enable us to respond swiftly to their demands, while generating benefits for people, the planet and the economic fabric of our business communities.
When developing new proposals designed to lift our service levels, we concentrate on three specific areas:
- Integration: everything in one click. We work to make it possible for our customers to shop with us by interacting with our various sales channels when, how and where they want.
- Full availability. We are innovating tirelessly to redefine, coordinate and synchronize our processes (design, manufacturing, procurement, transport, logistics, distribution and sales) with the goal of building a flexible model that is capable of adapting to the circumstances prevailing at any given point in time.
- Convenience and efficiency. Our aim is to optimize the shopping process by providing advanced technology that makes it more user friendly end to end.
Our response to the challenges raised by society in relation to personal well-being, diversity, responsibility, sustainability and transparency also drive our innovation effort. Here we are working on four core areas:
- Efficiency and agility. We speeding up processes to improve our customers’ shopping experience and reinforce their bond with us. To that end we are innovating tirelessly to reconfigure and coordinate the processes that make up our business model.
- Our people. They are the key to everything we do. Innovation is inextricably linked to the work we do to attract and retain the finest talent, to train our professionals and facilitate their professional growth and their well-being at work.
- Community. We are constantly looking for new ways to respond to social challenges by leveraging science and technology. We are therefore investing in social innovation with the aim of finding sustainable, effective and efficient solutions.
- Planet. We have developed innovative initiatives at every stage of our products' life cycle and in all areas of our activities in order to bolster environmentally-friendly development and combat climate change, specifically championing the transition to a circular economy, the manufacture of safe and more sustainable products and the decarbonisation of the industry.
The protection of information and continuity of all of the processes supporting our sales channels are of the utmost importance to us. In 2021, we completed the Next Generation Cybersecurity Plan put in place to fully develop our IT security system.
We also carried over the 2020 initiative of organising taskforces to focus on how to prevent cyber-attacks and defined new initiatives, such as the Supply Chain – Third-Party Risk Management programme, centred on analysing the impact of cybersecurity in our supply chain.
