United.b relies on innovation to pursue its commitment to sustainable development.
From the Cloud to Data and AI, the company is working with Microsoft to deploy more efficient and sustainable IT infrastructures, drive its ESG strategy and optimize its trade-in, refurbishment, and resale model.
More than a supplier-customer relationship, Microsoft and United.b are linked by a European trade-in program for products from the Microsoft Store, managed by United.b.
The circular economy is now at the heart of United.b. This platform is made up of several companies from the retail and electrical goods sectors, all driven by the desire to offer the most complete and positive circular supply chain possible for electronic products, from distribution to recycling, including buy-back and reconditioning.
For each brand on the platform, a sustainable and responsible approach requires in-depth internal transformation. This is what the strategic partnership between Microsoft and United.b is about.Here's an overview.
One of the key aspects of the partnership is the migration of the platform's infrastructures to the Cloud and Microsoft Azure. "We know the virtues of the public Cloud and Microsoft's ability to provide high-performance, flexible and energy-efficient environments," explainsSébastien Hidocq, Chief Digital Officer at United.b.
The aim of this migration to the cloud is to enable each of the Group's brands to be part of a Green IT dynamic. “The Cloud gives us the means to run our business applications in a truly efficient environment, consuming the right resources at the right time,”the CDO adds. It’s a "must" for the platform and its subsidiaries, which are subject to cyclical activity throughout the year.
The Group's frugal approach is also reflected in the implementation of an extra-financial data strategy aimed at better measuring its environmental impact. The goal is to simplify, automate, and speed up the collection and processing of this data in order to offer better products and adopt a more virtuous approach towards “our customers, our employees, and our ecosystems.” That is why United.b has selected Microsoft Sustainability Manager: "We want to take advantage of Microsoft's power to efficiently address data management, and thus be ahead of the game on a subject that will become central in the months to come,"Sébastien Hidocq elaborates.
This solution will support the construction of the extra-financial report required by the CSRD, and is designed to help the Group identify relevant data and develop reliable measurements, which will in turn help in decision-making, in order to create an even more sustainable circular supply chain: “We'll be able to evaluate our actions, our trajectories, and achieve our ambitions,”Sébastien Hidocq explains.
Microsoft Sustainability Manager has been deployed within Electro Dépôt to facilitate the identification and provision of data inherent in United.b's transport activities and energy consumption falling under CSRD scopes 1 and 2, and should be progressively extended to scope 3 in order to roll out the service to all Group subsidiaries and “cover 100% of our impacts and extend the approach to all our entities.”
At the same time, Recommerce, as part of the United.b platform ecosystem and one of Europe's leaders in the refurbished products trade-in and resale, sees AI as a tool to strengthen its mastery of used-product pricing and product failure detection, thanks in particular to the Azure OpenAI Service solution. "Unlike the new devices market, where all products are identical and therefore have a fixed price, the refurbished market is made up of products that have all had a first life, which condition and therefore value is unique, and that makes them hard to assess,"explains Pierre-Étienne Roinat, co-founder of Recommerce, "AI is relevant with our predictive pricing logic given the large amount of data involved. It will enable us to improve the performance of the circular economy." Generative AI is thus particularly valuable for predicting usage trends as well as pricing trends in an uncertain and fluctuating environment. Based on a statistical approach encompassing millions of prices evolving daily, correlated with purchasing trends, this new wave of AI is capable of estimating the right price for each second-hand product they receive. It also predicts which market—among the 25 markets Recommerce operates—will give the greatest sales potential to that same product.
In the same spirit of optimization and quality, Recommerce developers use GitHub Copilot to produce lines of code and technical documentation. The aim is to support these experts in developing, using PHP and Python, a customized financial platform to manage the refurbishing business, from purchasing to sales, incorporating all the specific features associated with the circular economy.
We want to take advantage of Microsoft's power to efficiently address data management, and thus be ahead of the game on a subject that will become central in the months to come.
Sébastien Hidocq, Chief Digital Officer, United.b
"The tools and technical foundations we are deploying today will be at the heart of our management tomorrow, enabling us to meet the challenges that lie ahead,"analyzes Sébastien Hidocq. "The history we're writing today is being written in partnership with Microsoft, which shares the same values and commitments as United.b,"he continues.
And those shared values are far from insignificant. In addition to the commercial dimension of their relationship, the two players are indeed developing a European take-back and recycling program for products from the Microsoft Store, managed by Recommerce.
"As a committed player, Microsoft has a role to play in the development of the circular economy, and we support it with a 360° approach,"Pierre-Étienne Roinat analyzes, “by being on the one hand a Microsoft customer and on the other hand a Microsoft partner, buying used products and distributing refurbished Microsoft products.”This interdependence and shared commitment to sustainability is what makes their relationship so unique and strong.
AI is relevant with our predictive pricing logic given the large amount of data involved. It will enable us to improve the performance of the circular economy.
Pierre-Étienne Roinat, Co-founder, Recommerce
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