After hours case study sessions - Royal Canin

Key Takeaways

great so um let's kick this off hello everyone and welcome back to one of the two cases that we're hosting at the forum today this session provides an opportunity to dive a little deeper and get a sense of how one company is understanding and solving problems i'd like to understand i'd like to extend a very warm welcome to luigi and yasin who has actively encouraged me to pronounce his surname but i'm going to give it a shot anyway uh louis is the ceo of royal canin a multinational company with the purpose of improving the health of every dog and cat and also a multi-billion dollar brand that has been growing double-digit for more than a decade yassin is a senior director for operations and capabilities at economics and mutuality solutions the strategy and design consultancy behind the management toolkit that you'll see illustrated in this session and also behind much of the forum before i hand over to them my name is laura i'm your host for this case and we'll be using roughly the first half hour to hear from the week and your scene and see a presentation from them and in the second half they'll be taking questions from you so please use the q a function to send your questions our way let's get started luik over to you thank you laura it's a pleasure to be back actually i had the honor of of uh of uh giving a lecture two years ago uh really around uh what what does it mean and why why arcana is interested in economics of mutuality uh and i'm very pleased that we will be showing some of the progress we've made with the help of yasin in the in the last two years so um as you can see the most important character on this picture and when you work at arkana is actually my dog a female boxer coco very lively uh everything we do at warakana is for cats and dogs and for their health um this is really uh uh our purpose and this is what motivates and and drives us if we move on on the next slide really what uh the the reason why we are embracing eom is because it's a management uh innovation in fact uh and it's um it enables us to look at the business in a different way and to start our initiative our activities um our our measurement of performance but as well our innovations with a different prism um than a more holistic and i would argue actually a very modern prism so what is the role of the firm and what we should be doing and if you you know according to the eom philosophy the role of the firm is to solve meaningful challenges profitably and why is that important well basically you you design your activity and your contribution as a company of why you are existing by picking up a challenge you're solving for people or for the planet and you need to do that in an efficient way and that's really the the performance aspect is the effectiveness of your resolution and obviously the profitability is what makes you sustainable as an enterprise of a time your business needs profit to succeed and if they are profitable they can actually do really good uh overall and and contribute uh to society so if we uh if we move to to the next um the foundation of economics of mutuality is is really threefold one is to define what's your purpose why do you exist as an enterprise and i would argue this can be valid for a non-profit organization or any other institution in fact but in this case we apply it in business um what is a unique contribution that as a company you're actually bringing and defining your purpose requires to de-center yourself as an organization your purpose cannot be just to grow yourself bigger your purpose is really what is the contribution you're bringing to uh all the stakeholders around you and how do you create value in a holistic way not just in a financial way but in a holistic way and very successful businesses create values in multiple ways today you know some by organizing knowledge some by creating networks uh and some by making products or producing services but the important thing is to define the why and and why you're here and i will give the example of mars and why are canada in a minute the second step is really once you define your purpose to map your ecosystems in which you operate what are the stakeholders that we work with how they are interact in interacting with each other what's the quality of their relationship um and how uh what are their pain points what are the the vulnerabilities is in the ecosystem and to use that as a way to drive some of your initiatives some of your innovation some of the contribution you need to make and of course the third pillar is managing and measuring multiple forms of capital and why this is critical is um is is because looking at your business with all the stakeholders in mind and the different forms of capital will actually make the business more resilient over time uh because you will share more value and enrich the contribution and so we we see that really happening in difficult times business that are it's a is the old adage that you need to make friends before you need them but it's really the same thing in business is you build your business is only as strong as your entire value chain and all the partners in the value chain so how do you measure the health of your business model is by really looking at the fourth form of capital social capital is about relationship human capital is really about knowledge natural capital are the resources we consume and of course the financial capital uh we we know that very well is what is what fuels over all the engine when you look in today's world value is not only created by making products some entire business models are built around social capital facebook whatsapp instagram all these networks are all about relationship and this is and they create massive value their market capitalization is absolutely huge um some companies are building their business model totally on human capital i would argue that you know google as a as an example decided to organize the knowledge of the world wikipedia is is uh is on the non-profit side another example but there are entire business models that are around human capital um maybe less around you know entire business design around natural capital but it's emerging as well you have entire companies today that try to provide solutions to improve the the consumption the replenishment of natural resources around the world so it's really and and the more you look at building your business around those four forms consciously the more powerful the more sustainable the more long-term successful will be the business model at least that's our hypothesis and our assumption we move to the next slide the real question is how do we get there and this is really a basic five-step approach it's very practical uh it's not a magic formula or recipe and it's an offer we are making you this is what we are using today in our canada uh with the help of of of yaseen and and the eom team that we have developed first you choose a meaningful challenge as a purpose second you map your ecosystem third you decide what are the pain points in your ecosystem you want to solve and fourth you create those intervention and measure their impact and that's the most important measure the effectiveness and finally which is probably the biggest issue today we have is how do we develop a set of metrics that are non-financial to really validate the overall approach and to be able to steer it going forward i.e to make meaningful decision on a day-to-day basis or on an annual basis or mid-term basis on the next slide i will illustrate an example for each of them so a meaningful challenge in the case of royal canada our meaningful challenge is we want to improve the health of every cat and dog now why we do that we do that because we have a view and a belief that nobody has a pet just to feed them they have a pet because it adds value in their life it creates a benefit to them and therefore our overarching purpose is to make a better world for pets in wanting to make a better world for pets we try to define our unique contribution and our unique contribution being a nutrition company we actually make a pet food a nutrition solution for cats and dogs food professionals we want to improve the health outcome of a cat and a dog we believe that nutrition can change the physiological condition of a cat and a dog can make them live longer and better so we define our unique contribution and that's our meaningful challenge on the next slide then once we've defined that we're basically looking at mapping the entire ecosystem around us and this is where we've done that with yaseen and his team through really qualitative and quantitative research we basically looked at all the stakeholders around the pet and the petronas and so the minute you you know what is the journey of a cat owner or dog owner with whom do they interact in their ecosystem and what you see here is a cartography a total map and the little cube you you see with uh different colors around each of the stakeholder are defined for the four capitals so each color is a different capital and in doing that we try to identify the vulnerabilities uh the pain points the tensions in the ecosystem between the players or for the players and based on that it gives you an information on how you can create a healthier ecosystem around you which will make everybody benefit so what are the intervention that you want to take on and taking a very concrete example so in our case if our overall challenge is to you know promote health mapping the ecosystem the challenge and the opportunities are to improve the physiological outcome of the for the cats and for the dogs and how we can do that and and basically what is the social economical and cultural challenges that all the pet professionals or the stakeholders around are faced with and mapping those two dimensions gives us basically a source of insight that we can act on and we can define innovation in business model or in product or we can even design activities that will make the ecosystem healthier overall on the next slide i will give very concrete example uh in order to uh for everybody to understand the mechanic the vulnerabilities for example we identify uh three example here pepe and kitten just i give you one data point um puppy and kitten uh are the most fragile uh of course animals in the world and many of them are uh are being fed uh you know adult food straight on which is one issue but the other issue is in a case of purpose for example one in five uh do not survive past two weeks i in one puppy liter basically 20 of them uh will uh die and so at work we say well okay this is something that we can do something about and if we and why it's important because obviously the breeder feels bad about this emotionally it's a drag it's a drain but it's as well not good for his financial capital because uh he cannot sell those puppies so there is an emotional dimension to that which is the social really relationship of breeders with their community of stakeholders but there is as well a financial capital element to it and the point is we can do something about that so we design an intervention and we spend five years with the vet university of toulouse to design to study it and basically to design the milk replacement product because the reason why was purpose die is because they are not strong enough to access uh built uh the beach milk so we we designed a substitute product but we went much beyond that we helped the readers to define a mortality diagnostic so they can identify the weakest puppy by basically observation making sure they identify them early and they can save them now in doing that we end up increasing the survival rate which in turn is is a great reward for the breeder and of course improve their financial capital now the point i've made before is this product is super niche and and obviously we don't we're not really making a return on this because the target group is very narrow but what we have done is we created a totally new set of knowledge a human capital in a neonatology field so by tackling this challenge we work with professionals to create the knowledge that knowledge enables us to create a product and services that enables a breeder to remove a big pain point and by doing that we increase the health of the ecosystem obviously being a positive player into this world we would expect as well to have a positive reputational benefit uh with with breeders around the world and they might recommend walking as a brand hopefully so you know this is not done for free but the side benefit comes way after we've done the work if we look at the second example i have which is really puppy and kitten it's another striking number more than half of cat owners basically don't really take their cat to the vet because they don't think it's necessary why do we think it's an issue a cat is a very modern animal with urbanization there is a rise of cat cat cat ownership around the world the easier animal to live with in a city they can stay alone for a while more than dogs they're very independent but in a way they have two issues is cats can't speak they hide their pain it's very very difficult to understand whether they are well or not and of course they are extreme for anybody who try to bring a cat somewhere it's very very hard to put them in a in a crate so that you can actually transport them to a veterinary clinic and when you arrive at the clinic they are dogs so the cats feel super stressed and it smells dog in the consultation room and so they are very hard to handle for veterinarians so basically we we realized we needed to do something about this because cats are less cat food than dog in a major way it's a rising population and the experience for cats owner is terrible and so remember we we're only doing kibble we're doing doing pet food but we decided to take on this challenge and say we can do something about that and we're investigating um you know with pet owners with veterinarians how to change this paradigm and we design an activity called take your cat to the vet where we basically train veterinarians and vet technicians how to prepare the clinic to welcome cats how to talk to the cat owner on how to help them prepare for the trip and at the same time we run an entire campaign publicly to create awareness for the cat owner that they need to do that and if they do that they will have a better experience with their cat over time they will be able to prevent issues to happen and occur going forward and we uh share with them the tips on as well how to uh organize for this trip this campaign has started in one country is now in 35 this is the fourth year we're doing it why is it good it's good because the health outcome for the cat is very positive they are better cared for um we are establishing a relationship between cat owners and veterinarians that do not exist very well today or actually is is not large enough we created human uh capital by um you know studying how to improve that experience and we trained vet technicians veterinary clinics and pet owners in doing this and obviously it will create a positive financial capital for veterinarians because they will see more patients and hopefully they will recommend as well i can have food so we are hoping to have of course a financial capital outcome for us as well it's just an example that yes we are a business but when you look at your business in its entirety you come up with a very different way of designing your activation and your initiatives and sometimes your innovation and my last example is really an innovation for veterinarians veterinarians you know yasin has actually helped us understand that because of the rise of e-commerce actually we are tapping into the reputation of veterinarians that recommend our product but they are being challenged because some of these products are being sold online cheaper and what happens is veterans don't want to be seen as salesmen they are doctors uh and they don't want to be criticized or challenge because somehow somebody is selling the same thing cheaper so we are in a way we are deteriorating their um social capital uh in due to a competitive change of landscape and what we did was in an innovation we wanted to bring to market for a long time which is a multi-pathology nutrition solution we decided to design the business model in a way that we give back to the veterinarian their role as a doctor and so we totally change the way this innovation is working where the product doesn't exist before the diagnostic is made so the veterinary ions make it diagnostic collect the data and based on like diagnostic we are running an artificially intelligent algorithm that basically proposes the best nutrition solution and if the owner agrees we will then make the product on demand which that product doesn't exist on the market you can't find it anywhere it has to go for the vitamin ion and it's totally based on the diagnostic of the veterinarians which you know really rebuild their reputation and their credibility and we are merely the provider of the nutrition solution in this case so we are disentering ourselves from this ecosystem what can i individualist has been introduced in france germany and now in japan and it's really interesting to look at we have designed that in a way to really solve the problem that occured to vitarin ions which is they want to be doctors and so how do we make them doctors in a center of the nutrition response they need to give to pet owners so these are really my my free examples of how you can design an innovation an activity or an entire new business model because you follow this approach of choosing a meaningful challenge mapping your stakeholders identifying the tension points and really trying to design intervention that improve the health of the ecosystem around you and to complete this of course is are we effective in doing that how do we measure how we are successful how do we anticipate whether we invest enough in social capital in human capital for the health of our business model overall and on that i will leave yes in taking you through our progress in the last two years so hello everyone and thank you for the great introduction um so as we come to uh the the step where we want to be able to measure and track performance against this these uh you know i would say more holistic approaches to business modeling our inspiration was uh from the approach that the oecd has proposed uh a decade ago about how to measure impact and this actually extends not only to companies but also to ngos government any kind of um of organization who wants to have a systemic impact should try to look at what they do through this kind of matrix that we usually call theory of change right so you have a certain purpose or impact in mind like for example providing access to education to uh villages in rural india right and in order to do that you say okay i'm going to build a school okay so you're going to mobilize some resources and those resources can be of the four capitals you know money force for financial capital uh people for human capital relationship with local authorities for example for social capital and you're going to you know buy or rent the land get the authorization build the school now this activity has what we call an output the output is just the tangible product of that activity so for building a school for example it could be the number of seats that you're offering to children in that village in india okay now if only eight students come to your school then from the perspective of the village so of the outside targets actually the outcome is only eight students so if i'm just i you can you kind of start to see here the difference in metrics between the typical business metrics who are based on outputs so if i'm a busy if i'm a business i usually will measure you know advertising reach i will measure unit sold etc and those are outputs of my activities now if i want to understand my impact on the ecosystem i need to understand outcomes and in this case that's the difference between offering 32 seats and having eight students attend right so we can get a bit more sophisticated by looking at you know counterfactuals and how does it do against the control group et cetera and that's kind of the the subtle differences between outcomes and impacts so for example if you already had a program running in that village uh by the government that gave access to six of the eight students you know to education then maybe your impact is only two your incremental impact but let's set that aside for now and focus on the difference between what people call outputs and what they call outcomes so again let's say um you're uh you want to limit the propagation of infectious disease and this example was created way before we were talking about cov19 so let's say you build a soap factory and you create a huge campaign on hand washing your outputs will be how much your campaign reached and uh how much you sold but your outcome will be what percentage of people change their behavior okay so are they washing their hands more often etc okay so i just want to uh kind of introduce this aspect because it's going to be really important so when you try to implement this type of approach within a business like wild canal you get into this okay what we're saying is that whatever your activities you're going to mobilize people money relationships and natural resources okay you you're going to have a certain number of activities which in the case of royal canada we'll have some kind of reach when we're talking about campaigns you know a number of users when we're talking about online platforms a number of pets feds and sales uh when we were talking about you know the just the output of the food production business okay but as outcomes you know the way that royal caring sees themselves creating an impact on pet health is through improving the well-being and the nutrition knowledge of professionals like specialized stores breeders shelters veterinarians okay there is also another outcome so again it's talking for taking outcomes from the perspective of the outside world okay of the ecosystem another outcome is the economic performance of these people so specifically for example the breeders only 17 percent of them are able to make a living doing breeding okay and specialized stores are massively challenged by both modern trade like supermarkets but also online right veterinarians themselves are not necessarily in a very rosy uh financial situation depending on the market and the context so them being able to have a sustainable economic model is also something that roy canine is contributing to and seeing as one of their key outcome objectives all right last but absolutely not least this whole thing only works if there is a solid trust between pet owners and veterinarians or pet owners and professionals and also between pet professionals and royal canin so those basically are three types of outcome and we mentioned human social and financial capital that if we manage to um address them add that to the quality and product innovation coming out of royal canal on their supply side then combining these the the the product design and the product innovation on one hand and specific interventions aimed at addressing the socio-economic and cultural barriers to pet health we then are able to have an impact on on pet health as as could be measured with metrics like healthy life expectancy at birth you know or prevalence of certain diseases etc okay and this is basically a broad perspective of how we put in place a theory of change within a company and uh and basically the sustainability and own economic performance of the company itself is actually in the output section because of course the the sales of the company are outputs okay so it's not neglected it's actually part of the thing that we need to be able to deliver and this is how it looks like you know for a specific intervention okay we start with with a bunch of tensions or pain points within the ecosystem in this case we're talking about uh the sustainability of the breeder profession okay so here we have typically three big pain points one that is human capital their professional well-being is really low um the the trust between them and adopters is quite low too that's social capital and their financial viability is very fragile that's financial capital and uh royal canyon decided to uh create basically this breeding management system accompanied with a quality quality certification and adoption platform all of these digital platforms and training programs that are designed by rc are aimed at these three pain points but have their own metrics right so for example the percentage of breeders recommending their jobs is very low and that's a good way of keeping track of the professional well-being same thing about the percentage of pet owners who actively recommend to not go to a breeder and that's very high at 60 percent as well as the famous 17 percent of breeders who can make a living so those aspects here are all very simple straightforward ways to measure non-financial performance or sometimes even financial performance uh and in key tension points within the ecosystem and of course the lagging matrix would be the purpose matrix which is for the pet health metrics but also the economic performance of royal canada and this is how basically we we reconcile this idea of the firms being there to solve meaningful challenges profitably the meaningful challenge is the is the purpose metric uh profitably that's going to be our sustainability matrix but that meaningful challenge isn't going to be broken down into key elements we want to improve within the ecosystem and those are what we're going to call the outcomes okay so those leading metrics on these slides you know are the outcomes you may then ask but you know how do we relate those outcomes you know if i improve the situation of the breeders or the vets or the pet owners you know am i reaping a benefit too like am i able to actually deliver these outcomes in a profitable way well these are some early results from a recent study we've done in countries who had high growth for rc over the last 10 years versus on the right hand side some lower growth countries again for royal canada over the last 10 years and what you can see is that if i look at the veterinarian's data that we collected through this recent study in 2019 and 20. in high-growth countries vets would recommend their jobs much more than those this is a 1 to 10 scale than they would in low-growth countries that's a very similar situation for satisfaction with income so shared financial capital satisfaction with admin workload is much higher in high growth country than in low gross countries we're talking about veterinarians these are external stakeholders last but not least the relationships with the suppliers through the sales food rep is also much better and and the satisfaction is much higher with that relationship in high growth countries versus low growth countries so we quickly can see that there is a direct link between those elements of human social and shared financial capital and the economic performance of the firm so essentially what we're describing here is what might well be a superior economic model just through a better better taking into account the whole ecosystem you know using purpose as a kind of basis of strategy basis for strategy and measuring the outcomes in a way that while still being simple actually still addresses the key tensions in that ecosystem all right so uh those were this is our presentation so i think we reach now the phase where we're ready to answer any questions you guys may have great thank you so much um and yes i loved the way uh the week you you drew out this uh axiom make friends before you need them and then illustrated that so uh elegantly with um the research about neonatal deaths and puppies and kind of equipping the rest of the ecosystem with that information and also the take your cat to the vet um initiative that was that was great to hear and thank you also your team for bringing us back to measurement um the theme of today um so i'm just looking out for questions coming in uh please feel free to send them over but while we while we look out for those um i wanted to uh come back to the fact that obviously royal canaan works in many countries and i can imagine that challenges and pain points for vets in in different countries vary hugely and the ecosystems can be entirely different so how does the how does the mapping system how does the mapping um change and how do you address regional differences in in the process that you follow well it's you're absolutely right uh and and that's why it's um we decided to use ecosystem mapping actually at uh at the country level uh so uh we we have done it i think in uh anything you will tell me if i'm wrong six countries so far yes around the world so we we had to be choiceful on which country we we are doing that but we we did it in a way that is quite um constructed if you want so we we took emerging markets we took a very mature market markets where we're doing very well and we took markets we were not doing so well uh so that we can understand the difference and illustrate as well and build our own conviction uh about that because for example the in my organization the easiest thing to do for a general manager is to disinvest in uh in human and social capital with breeders or with veterinarians because this is a this is an investment over the mid and long term this is it doesn't allow you to make your quarterly numbers or your yearly numbers and so if they are under pressure this is a probably this could be the first thing they cut and i have no way to see it as a genome as a as a president of the company in fact uh i get all sorts of financial reports but i don't have a report on the quality of the social capital in that country um and that's why for us it was important to do that so we've been discerning i would say in mapping the ecosystem in six countries that are in very different stage of development either for us or as an industry and in order to build our own expertise and knowledge about that some themes are totally transversal like the component is totally transversal because it's linked to the species and not to the profession itself some themes will be totally local so shelters for example are very well handled in some countries you know germany is a good example where you have very good quality shelters well-funded very different issues than in other countries where it it's actually pretty bad uh overall so that would be the answer so some we can design some initiatives globally and then some of them have to be actually very local within if we and you were saying you were seeing on your screen um the french ecosystem i can also share with you the show you an example of the chinese one which we'll see you will see although it bears some resemblance at first sight i don't know if you still see my screen act by the way oh yes i would reshare my screen no problem let's do that so the examples you saw in the presentations were from the french ecosystem app um this this one is the one from poland and this last one is one from china okay as you can see there are many more profiles of vets because there are actually that's uh uh it's a much more heterogeneous popular population in china and in china you also have some um the the the role that law enforcement and and and that's you know local authorities play can also be uh larger and the relationships within this ecosystem are a bit different uh starting with the fact that in some markets you also have some cultural aspects um to uh to pet ownership like for example dogs can be considered as being overall relatively dangerous and dirty and therefore there is a very strong social stigma that are faced by vets and nurses and other pet professionals who work with dogs who can actually suffer some personal and social costs linked to working in that area so i completely agree there are sometimes some very different circumstances uh i would say that one constant thing is that people find the vet to be expensive no surprise there and this is actually uh a key breakdown in the pet care ecosystem the funding of healthcare the the discrepancy between the expectations of healthcare and the funding of healthcare that's quite common across all stakehol all markets that we've looked at but yet we do see some key differences also between markets it's really interesting to see and and make sense that with that information you are then equipped to work out how to what to deliver to best um uh respond to your purpose um i'd like to take a question now from steve griffiths thank you steve uh he'd like to know if there's anything unique about how real canon have set yourselves up internally that allow you to behave like this and support the entire ecosystem um so yes and no so it's perfect but we we have an organization by stakeholder we support so for example i have a vertical organization really dedicated to support veterinarians and another one vertically dedicated to support what we call pet professionals such as breeders merchers shelters you know and then another one which is around really the customers and so on which enables us to sort of start from there their pain point and their request so it's true that it is uh we are now basically because we have ecosystem mapping the pulling charge of the strategy development uh starts with the payment of all stakeholders and walk back their strategy to build on what we call an outcome-based strategy and from that they look at the input that we need to bring in in the design of those activities so next to purpose-driven ecosystem mapping and measurement we we now have now another tool which outcome-based strategy uh you know which are really designed to resolve the pain point now measuring the effectiveness of that resolution is is is a challenge because very often the impact is over years so if your design of your the intervention that is meant to resolve the pain point doesn't work you know it will take you time uh to uh to resolve that but so yes i think in a way we have an organizational setup that enables us to really of some of the stakeholders in our ecosystem not all of them but some of them and there is accountability in the organization for that great and and in terms of the this organization these these pillars that you have is that something that royal connect has always had or is that something that's changed um over time uh so it does evolve over time and we started to move this way around 2010 and become really really uh strict about that organizational model uh about five years ago um and we are we keep reinforcing this uh really strongly uh where where basically we we look at uh you know addressing if you want the so the the organizational makeup of the organization is probably 10 years old but thinking is is very recent uh is uh two three years and with the work of yasin that we our challenge was at least my realization of royal canada is in a way we were a little bit like obelix uh somehow we were doing some of eom without knowing it but we put our finger on it and now we are kind of really creating the concepts uh so it's not just an institutional knowledge it's something that we can we can articulate conceptually and we can tools for it uh the risk we we had is in some places we were doing it very well and in others we were not doing it very well at all and because we didn't have metrics and we didn't have tools so that's that's the change in the last uh yeah three to five years really interesting to hear did you have anything to add to that you're seeing and and i think what we're describing here maybe links to one of the questions that's being asked which is you know how does this like we're supporting the external ecosystem through this approach um uh how is that support uh kind of a sustainable kind of systemic resource for maybe other innovators who may want to introduce to bring their own solutions um i think this this is i think this is a very good question and at the same time it takes us it takes us back to uh there is a step in that there's five steps that is choose the problems you want to solve okay the ecosystem is the same for everyone but different people might choose to solve different problems okay so the main thing we've been doing i think on the diagnostic side is to basically share this type of map with other players who are interested in it okay in the ecosystem but at the same time when you see that royal canyon invested five years in neonatology research that's public peer-reviewed research you know published in the journals that are academic journals so in the sense a lot of the investments that reykjavik is doing since they are aiming at changing outcomes in the ecosystem they are inherently supporting the ecosystem okay right that makes sense and i think that that answers um david's question around the fact that royal canin is obviously not the only problem solver or innovator in this system and he's interested in understanding how you work with kind of ecosystem-wide or distributed um uh change-making um so i've just i've just answered that question by uh in some cases we do uh uh work with uh determination or kennel clubs for example to really address some uh some overall industry uh challenges and we're part of it and you know in other cases we have examples where we we work with the regulators and uh including our just to really establish kind of norms in nutrition or in pet ownership quality especially in emerging markets which is uh which is really an effort to to make sure pets are treated well we are currently collaborating a total mass pet care level to create for example a pet homelessness index which is really to measure pet abandonment and and how we resolve that uh it's it's a totally industry-wide initiative uh to uh to basically eradicate pet homelessness and we we are trying to work out a definition for that and making sure that there is no unwanted pet that are in unappropriate uh uh places and uncared for and so this is uh so you know we have very good examples of doing that with others and and participating obviously we're not covering all of the pain points and you know we can only chew what we can uh one at a time but but there is a real real appetite to uh to uh to do this collaboratively when we can uh in some in in our case in some cases we partner with diagnostic firms to understand better the issues that veterinarians in some pathology cannot detect and we work with them to develop that uh all sorts of small examples uh in in collaborating uh for for resolving pain points and i'd like to move back towards um the measurement uh the measurement kind of question um around a lot of what you described uh in the presentation was at a a country or a market level so quite um uh macro but if we if we're looking at something that goes down to um uh down to a more specific level at the level of teams how does how does that work and how do they how do they fit together yeah so this is a this is a huge challenge in fact and i will know i will not say that we are we are perfect at this point but we have we start to uh so the metrics that yassin for example has shown uh for breeders starts to diffuse down the organization and they need to translate that and take the outcome we look back into an input and then we what we will tend to do is to shorter measure how where we are doing on the input we believe that will have an impact on the outcome because we cannot measure the outcome uh at a high frequency level and so we we will put a lot of effort to design intervention properly try to validate that that intervention has a positive outcome and then we will incentivize our team on the input measure really so are you running a take your cut to the vet activity so now that we validated that take your cat to the vet works are you guys doing it is the quality you're doing it well have you embarked with veteran irons in your market so we will not measure the outcome immediately because we will only see that in three years but we will measure the quality of the of the input intervention if you want and examples of how it cascaded in factories is when you want to impact health obviously your products have to be at a level of quality and food safety that is a totally different level than when you're not so you know you're concretely measuring people differently it's not just the number of tons you can make is really the the quality of that product that product needs to work and it needs to be safe so you have to change the metric otherwise people respond to the to the metric that they are measured on i mean it's it's very clear uh so it's a journey and i think it requires a lot of intelligence in in collective intelligence to design those metrics at every level in the organization right and from the very very bottom kind of in factory level to um the beyond just countries and markets to the whole firm are there any metrics that you that you take to to that level and consider and track so that's not yet uh and here i have a lot of hope that with digital technology and digital platform we will start to get aggregated data cross-country for example so for example we created a platform to help breeders and uh and uh with services and uh you know they they they register their populators on it uh and so we can see how many of the populators have uh of the of the puppies have made it and we can see how many of them have been adopted so we can we suddenly you know when breeders agree to be on a platform they get access to a lot of services from us but that helps us as well to really measure whether we are making a difference or not which is very difficult to do in the physical world but with digital technology it's becoming easier so this is one way that we are looking at in order to uh to basically get aggregated data backup the only measurement i have that is a non-financial that is on that level today is on puppy kitten uh recruitment around the world uh for for arkana and how many uh we have helped being adopted so uh though so we we need we need to develop much more the aggregate of metrics and i'm hopeful that as i said with platforms and digital technology so i i wanted to also to bring up the fact that the challenge of aggregate metrics is not only a technical challenge there is a strategic challenge linked to that too which is that the key breakdown or the key problem in some countries might not be the same remember when we said that we were having a map in china and a map in france and a map in sweden and thailand whatever okay that means that we may want to actually prioritize some key outcomes in the ecosystem that might be have a different level of priority for the u.s ecosystem versus the thailand one and as a consequence aggregating some metrics might be meaningless at some point and like the if we want to be true to the purpose the purpose is to be translated into what you might call local meaning right so that people understand why they're doing things okay so again when we try to um aggregate these metrics um in in across different markets there is this challenge of being able to aggregate matrix and still be meaningful in what we're measuring and how we're treating them so in a sense there might be like the purpose metric itself for example the healthy uh the healthy life expectancy at birth can be something that absolutely can be done everywhere like or some aspect of uh homelessness index can potentially be deployed everywhere we still need to provide some flexibility to different types of markets or different types of regions to be able to contract with the global leadership to say here are the key issues we're fixing so maybe we don't aggregate exactly the same metrics everywhere but at least there is a meaningful way of cascading the purpose yeah that's a really interesting point uh metrics for metric's sake doesn't really make sense they've got to they've got to mean something and and inform what you're doing so thanks for that edition um another question leading on about um measurement um obviously there are there's a case for the positive um impact that pets have on their owners um has there ever been a consideration of measuring human the human health impact or is that one step too far so um it's not totally a step too far and actually some of our teams at some point had a vision that one day we will be you know somehow recognized as uh beneficial for social security system and things like that because we know that pet ownership is actually really uh has an impact on on people well-being uh and when when there are pets at home that you know it's it's just generally better for the well-being and the health of the family they have more active they have more interaction kids get less sick there's all sorts of benefits and and some of it has been totally scientifically proven with really the hormone both in the human and in the pet when there is an interaction so so the the point is we have those evidence from a scientific study point of view but we don't have them again on a regular ongoing aggregate basis so we we we you know so it's it is a stretch too far in a sense that it is not systematized today and you cannot make a case that okay this family didn't have a pet and then now they have a pet and so take a pet and your life will get better uh you know this this is a shortcut but we know that uh on an ongoing basis you know uh the the the the evidences of the positive role of pets in society is overwhelming and the question is how to to concretely measure that um the other element which is a counterbalance of that is the responsible part ownership one of the issues with pet ownership is pet owners believe they understand their pets and in fact they don't because cats and dogs don't speak um and as i said they hide their pain they and petunias very often project so they have an anthropomorphic um picture if you want of of their animal uh which is uh not totally the right one and and there's a real challenge in making sure that uh there is a responsible pet ownership out there uh and so we are working on both actually we're really uh having very active promoting uh activities in atmosphere carriable and responsible partnership and of course on promoting the the the benefit of petting society but we're not at a level where we can measure those intervention on an ongoing systemic basis it's more than intervention mode great and a question uh from alfred he's interested in the robustness and the way you review your indicators has there been a time when you've had to completely rebuild or change and indicate they're in the midst of a project and how did you manage that if so okay maybe this one yeah okay i can take a stab at it essentially if you want to define what a metric is and i'm sorry if i'm getting a little bit academic here a metric basically is a number that allows you to tell the difference between elements of a set right a metric measures the distance not something absolute but how different things are so the way that these metrics are designed is that they start with fairly large kind of based on academic literature type of measurements of well-being and relationships and trust and satisfaction okay so those are human and social capital questionnaires has been created a long time ago and we basically adapted them and run them in multiple areas to basically try to figure out what are the key dimensions the key variables that are able to tell us differences okay where there is variance across variable that are actually actionable because they're not the same for everyone now if everyone answers the same thing usually that means that it's not a really very useful metric okay so to have information you need variance so the analysis of that variance and the the the idea is basically to find the dimensions that best explain that variance and those dimensions then are explained by key variables so those variables are not chosen uh randomly they're chosen because they describe the axis of variance uh in in the data set okay so sorry i'm getting a little bit technical here but it's the question i think warren sits and so from that perspective that's actually fairly robust way from a questionnaire to questionnaire because um the the dimensions that where people don't agree those dimensions don't change a lot across time so we find a relatively stable uh basically dimensions of variants that we can reuse that being said what it is what is absolutely true is that sometimes you have multiple questions that the in the questionnaire that can explain a different specific dimension and then there was there is a choice to be made it's almost like a kind of a business choice like what question am i going to be to ask in my future questionnaires to represent that dimension okay so so the there is always a certain level of flexibility into how you keep track of of these metrics through time but at the heart of it the way the metrics are designed through quantitative analysis are designed in a way that provides a relatively irrelatively strong robustness in the sense that they don't change a lot from one questionnaire to the other when we do the full analysis i hope i must have answered the question and if i may add just on how does that can translate into business it's a totally different example but i'm sure we've all been faced with uh you know measuring the wrong output uh many many times actually because uh so i the example i have in my mind is uh is u