A clear vision for Luxottica's HR

Many companies today feel the need to achieve a quality leap forward in human capital management, so that they can support their company’s business strategies and provide the global capability to compete that the current economy demands.
In Italy, Luxottica, the global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of prescription frames and sunglasses, has always been at the forefront of implementing HR best practice.
The Group (which has 7 manufacturing plants, 28 branches and 54,000 employees) has faced and solved the need to: attract and retain their key people, identify and develop talent, link training activities to company’s competencies and measure the impact of the HR policies on both the balance sheet and on the company’s business strategy.
To manage their HR, Luxottica first chose to implement the Cézanne Suite back in 1999. A long-term project plan has allowed a gradual and smooth implementation of the system’s integrated HR modules. The last to be implemented (in chronological order only) has been the module for talent management, which is being used to manage the careers, performance, development and compensation of Luxottica’s top managers at an international level.

“Luxottica chose Cézanne in 1999, – explains Stefano De Marchi, HR Project Manager at Luxottica. “When I joined the company in 2000 the implementation of Cezanne 5, the last release on client/server architecture, had just been completed”. At that time Luxottica employed about 4,500 employees, spread over 6 locations in Italy and almost 30 branches worldwide, and Cézanne had been chosen mainly to manage the Italian workforce. “In order to align the data in the Cezanne system with our outsourced payroll a specific interface has been developed. – Says De Marchi – And, since installing a client/server system worldwide to manage the overseas branches would have been too expensive, Cézanne developed a web interface to collect the most significant data – high-level demographics, job titles, type of working relationships, compensation – all of which is manually entered by the branches”.

The Italian requirements were more complex, says De Marchi. In addition to the demographic data, there were managing functions, organizational structure, labor costs, group structure, and so on. “We needed to see the organizational structure so we could monitor the workforce distribution in different companies, buildings, departments etc. The Cézanne solution is able to automatically generate self-explanatory organizational charts and we can publish them on the company intranet”.

Since installing the core HR system, other elements have been added: Compensation & Planning, which is part of the Cézanne Suite, to manage labor costs and the personnel budget; Business Objects, which is integrated in the Cézanne solution and is also used extensively in the sales department, for reporting; and, last but not least, a time and attendance module.
“The Business Objects universe is mapped against Cezanne’s HR and Compensation database. At the same time, all the data from the time and attendance system, including historical information, is systematically collected: this allows us to completely control the labor cost of the manufacturing plants and gives us analysis capabilities (drill down) down to the individual employee.“ comments De Marchi.
Then there is the recruiting, selection and hiring process. Initially this had been solved with a third party product integrated with the Cézanne solution, which managed all the back office process for recruiting and selection, from authorization and Internet job-posting up to the hiring letter. Since 2004, with the upgrade to the web-based version 6 of Cézanne, Luxottica has been managing recruitment and selection using the functionality within the Cezanne suite.

Luxottica has also taken advantage of the functionality in the Cezanne system to implement a system for managing competencies in their manufacturing operation. This is linked to the HR aspects of the certification for ISO 9001/2000. This process, thanks to the full web architecture of Cézanne, is now managed directly by the supervisors, eliminating the paper archives and the “paper chase” within the departments.

In the near future, as far as human capital management is concerned, Luxottica has new projects planned to support the recently formed Corporate HR Department. First of all, using the Cézanne products, a new process for performance management and compensation will be implemented and managed. Currently this is a paper-based process, and is only used in Operation and Wholesale, which covers the production plants, the supply chain, the distribution branches and the staff areas. The project has two major components: MBO (management by objectives), for some tiers of high level employees, and a simplified system (called SIS) which will apply to a wider company population. The common ground will be a standard evaluation card with five key factors - objective and subjective - against which the goals will be measured.
The second project is Career Management, which is designed to completely manage succession and career planning for top level executives worldwide. On this project, the first step has already been taken – the set up of electronic, or e-Résumés. Currently, this only covers 250 people worldwide, but it will shortly be extended to all the executives of the Group. For the e-Résumé the reference database is Cézanne’s, to which tables have been added to allow integration with the other HRMS used in different branches and companies in the world (such as PeopleSoft in the USA and SAP in Asia-Pacific).

Future developments
What will be the future of HR in Luxottica? “I am following the evolution of HR systems, particularly in the North American market, with interest- explains Stefano De Marchi, HR Project Manager of Luxottica -, however the idea of having an HR system that is as integrated as possible, such as the Cézanne suite, is extremely important. As far as measuring the impact of human resources on the corporate objectives, we are talking about it – comments De Marchi. “There are two aspects that it is imperative to define carefully: the efficiency of our HR policies and the impact of people on the business objectives. We have been testing the first for quite some time now in the manufacturing area and this is going to be extended to the wholesale area; the second is a more advanced concept and requires that the system chosen as the central HRIS be extremely open, with for instance, a corporate HR data warehouse that is able to collect the data from all the company’s systems. With the support of the Cézanne solution, this is the goal we are aiming for in the first half of 2007."

About Luxottica Group
Luxottica (www.luxottica.it) was founded in 1961 by Leonardo Del Vecchio, from Milan, in Agordo, a little village in the Dolomites of Belluno: the Belluno province is one of the major producers of eye ware at world level. Since then, the company has become multi-national with a turnover of 4.37 billion euros. It is listed in New York and Milan, has 54 thousands employees, 28 branches, over 5 thousands stores all over the world, plus seven plants (of which six are in Italy, four in the Triveneto area and one in China). The Group has a strong vertical integration, which includes all the value chain phases, from design to retail sale. In addition to their own-name brand, Luxottica also owns brands such as Ray-Ban, Vogue and Persol, and it is a licensee of other world-famous brands such as Bvlgari, Byblos, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino, Prada, Ferragamo and Versace.

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