Cigierre, leader in the Italian hospitality sector with brands such as Old Wild West and Wiener Haus, has received Smau’s 2017 Innovation Project Award. In the last year it remarkably accelerated its digitization processes, especially thanks to the partnership with Zucchetti, on which it has been relying for years for different workforce management solutions. From the collaboration between the two companies a digital transformation and open innovation project was born, first of this kind in Italy, that enabled Cigierre to win the prestigious award.

Cigierre’s network implemented Zucchetti’s know-how to involve two Italian start ups, Satispay and GetYourBill for a better service delivery: the former enables mobile payments and loyalty operations and the latter reduces invoicing time for customers owning a VAT registration.

As Marco Apollonio, Cigierre’s Business Innovation manager explains: “We have obtained real benefits, both from a technological growth and customer satisfaction point of view. The collaboration with Zucchetti has been double: on one hand in the sales system field, to make different platforms dialogue, on the other hand to improve HR management, optimizing employees’ work, thanks to the use of AI to forecast and plan the need of resources, therefore reducing related costs. Our new internal organization is the result of the combination of these two aspects, that allowed us to work with very unique tools, from integrated planning to the acquisition of information and data useful to our business’ growth, such as predictive tools that are crucial in the hospitality sector.”