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Diversified conglomerate ITC Ltd is further scaling up its digital interventions across businesses and value-chains.
To move to the next phase of transformation, Sanjiv Puri, Chairman, ITC Ltd has announced the setting up of a ‘Young Digital Innovators Lab’ comprising digital natives from across the company’s businesses to crowd-source transformative digital strategies.
ITC embarked on a digitalisation journey by building digital capacity at scale, adopting cutting-edge technologies and is “effectively leveraging digital platforms to support wide-spread social transformation”.
New Initiatives
The ‘Young Digital Innovators Lab’ aims to enable young managers and ‘contribute more holistically’ to the company’s digital transformation, it said in a release.
The team of innovators, free to set their agenda and seek the necessary resources, will access ITC’s digital assets, evaluate the digital initiatives, identify best-in-class digital technologies and spot opportunities across value-chains.
The Young Digital Innovators Lab will also benchmark ITC’s initiatives against industry-best digital assets and platforms. It will evaluate how the Kolkata-based conglomerate can leverage emerging opportunities and enhance operational effectiveness across businesses (through digitization).
Puri has also announced to ITC employees the formation of a dedicated Digital Council of senior ITC managers, the ‘DigiNext’. It will ideate and sponsor high impact digital interventions and harness the synergies of cross-fertilization of ideas, the release added.
Substantial investments have been made in the creation of a digital eco-system to drive smart manufacturing, product quality, traceability and supply chain agility, amongst others.
Digital success stories
ITC’s Marketing Command Centre – 'Sixth Sense' – and the Customer Data Hub are some of the success stories. Based on the insights gained, several digital campaigns have been rolled out and product variants developed.
For example, social media trends like Dalgona coffee were leveraged to deepen consumer engagement for ITC's Sunbean Beaten Caffe and introduce a new variant in a long shelf life ambient format.
The company said, it has ramped up e-commerce as a distribution channel extensively, and the segment grew by over 100 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic. It is leveraging e-commerce platforms including its in-house ITCstore.in (for its FMCG offerings) and Classmateshop.com for customised notebooks.
Other digital initiatives include a B2B online ordering system for retailers, the ‘Unnati’ app; the agri-business division’s smart sourcing solution ‘Project Astra’ that leverages advanced technologies for procurement; the ‘Zen Desk’ omni-channel platform for customer care, deployment of chatbots, and so on.
Interventions in agriculture
The ITC e-Choupal 4.0 focuses on leveraging a digital ecosystem for farmers by strengthening agricultural entrepreneurship and agri-tech start-ups through agri services aggregator models.
ITC also partnered with the NITI Ayog, under Prime Minister’s Aspirational District initiative, to reach out to 4700 village level groups covering 3.7 lakh farmers through various digital platforms, demonstrating the power of digital technologies to train farmers and build capacity at scale.
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