We attain sustainable and profitable growth through our culture of innovation. We believe innovation is a must for sustainability in all areas, including our value chain and our products. We make efforts to develop our internal innovation culture with this philosophy, and with the "Always for the Better" motto.
We believe that the ideal environment for the growth of innovative ideas is one that encourages participation. As an important part of the “Us Culture”, we embrace an open innovation culture. In accordance with this, we include consumers as well as employees from every department and level in our innovation processes. Through our Kaizen Ideas system, we have been providing employees with the opportunity to make improvements in our operations and share their suggestions since 1990.
Similarly, with Yıldız Holding’s “Innovation, Inspiration and Idea Platform” Idea Stars we provide employees with the opportunity to share and implement their ideas. Thus, our employees are able to share their ideas to bring different ideas to life in everything from processes to working models and to find solutions to problems. Also, our employees can compete under the “calls” we present under Idea Stars and win certain prizes.
We support the spreading and internalization of the culture of innovation with InnoBook, the baseline book that will guide our journey to sustainable and profitable innovations. With our InnoBook, we will continue to develop and continuously improve the strong human resources we have built our culture on, as well as the processes and infrastructure to support it—with a general aim of success.
With the Innovation Days, we have been participating in the planning of since 2011 as a tradition, we plan to re-discover ourselves and our category and to make improvements that will make our consumers even happier than they are today. In line with our value of “taking strength from our changes”, we determined our theme of 2016 to be “Innovation is a way of life”.
Through the projects that compete in the products categories of the activities in the scope of Innovation Days, group companies are provided with the opportunity to participate in product development efforts. Also, we provide our employees with the chance to follow the inspirational talks of sector leaders online. Similarly, in the “Stars of the Year and Quality” activity, which enables sharing of the best business practices, we reward wining projects in the “Innovation” category to encourage implementation of new and different ideas. With these types of activities, we contribute to the development of an innovative culture and increase employee satisfaction and motivation.
We are always looking for ways to improve our production processes, along with developing products. As part of our efforts to attain operational excellence, we inspect our operational system regularly to complete missing points and to make existing steps more efficient. We also organize process management training programs. We have adopted the principles of meeting consumer expectations at the highest level with the target, "Zero Defects in Quality" and continuously improving customer satisfaction. We pore over consumer reports and undertake the required corrective measures. Additionally, we conduct inspections and testing to prevent quality-related problems at the source before they even arise by cooperating with suppliers.
Our chocolate plant was awarded the Industrial Excellence Award from the most reputable business schools in Europe and ranked the highest in Turkey. Our efforts for the “Road to Yıldız Excellence Program” over the last two years were the main reason behind this success.
The jury from the Industrial Excellence Award visited and audited the practices put in place by Ülker Çikolata in accordance with the “Road to Yıldız Excellence Program”. The jury noted that Ülker Çikolata not only established excellent infrastructure on the manufacturing side but also took this into account as a part of its corporate culture. These efforts and practices have enabled the company to achieve the leading position in Turkey in this category. Ülker Çikolata proves a good example to companies both in Turkey and abroad.