DSM Integrated Annual Report 2021

Enabling increased Precision & Personalization

The year 2021 saw the full mobilization of our Digital Nutrition Acceleration (DNA) program. Digital is no longer merely an enabler for our organization: it is also a strategic business driver, and the DNA program creates the digital foundation for key precision & personalization initiatives such as:

  • Hologram Sciences, Inc., our personalized nutrition venture, which brings together all the necessary capabilities to develop end-to-end turnkey personalized nutrition solutions that are commercially validated with consumers
  • Sustell™, a first-of-its-kind intelligent sustainability service that delivers accurate, simple and actionable farm-level solutions to reduce the environmental footprint and improve the profitability of animal farming
  • Verax™, a data-driven decision-making tool that helps veterinarians, nutritionists and operations make better decisions about their animals’ health

Another important milestone delivered as part of the DNA program in 2021 was the launch of a new customer-centric e-commerce tool, which enabled 10% of DSM’s sales to be moved online in just a few months. We also launched the Analytics Academy, defining and establishing our first communities of practice for Data Science, Data Engineering and Cloud Engineering.

Our scaling-up of automation continued in 2021, with another 40 bots being delivered, bringing our total to more than 200 and enabling the automation of numerous processes in Finance, Human Resources and Purchasing. The pandemic required us to accelerate the adoption of digital tools and practices among our workforce and laid down the key principles of new ways of working that will thrive in the Next Normal. We piloted with success our digital mindset change program in Latin America, the Netherlands and China by inviting employees to learn, ideate and try out digital approaches more and more often.

Senior management in webinar (photo)
Executive Committee. Top row: Dimitri de Vreeze, Geraldine Matchett and Patricia Malarkey. Bottom row: Philip Eykerman, Helen Mets and Cristina Monteiro.