My name is Alexander Torba. I’m a veterinarian with a PhD in biology. I’ve been with Hill's since June 1, 2011, and I still work there. From June 1, 2011, to March 15, 2024, I headed the company’s veterinary department — Professional Vet Affairs — in Russia.

During that time, I was fully responsible for the company’s relationship with the professional veterinary community, since our products are professional nutrition for companion animals — cats and dogs. For the company, professional recommendations from vets are a cornerstone, because access to the market and to the end customer goes through the recommendation of a specialist whom the pet owner trusts.

In this case, we’re talking about veterinarians: Russia has about 20,000 practicing vets working in roughly 4,500 vet clinics, plus students at veterinary schools across the country. All the work of the company and of the veterinary department I led for 13 years was aimed at building direct communication with vets and earning their loyalty through educational events in a range of formats.

These included in-person conferences, congresses, symposiums, round tables, and seminars, as well as online training through webinars. Since 2011, Hill's has been a pioneer in Russia in running educational events online, building a professional communication channel through social media that we consistently called Hill's Vet Russia — and we kept that name across every kind of communication with vets.

Planeta Hills was our next project, and its main goal was to build a single platform for remote engagement with the professional veterinary community. The project came about because we needed to adapt Hill's global principles, such as consistency and sustainability, to local conditions. For multinational companies, rolling out projects in regions far from headquarters can be hard, and it often leads to delays and inefficiency.

For example, when Hill's launches something new on its global site, there’s no telling when it will reach a local market like Russia. Sometimes you have to wait a long time for pages to be adapted and localized, and that doesn’t always match local needs. So we needed to run the project locally. The project, code-named Planeta Hills, was built on its own domain, planetahills.ru, which became a single information hub for working with vets.

The goal was to create a local, convenient, and friendly interface that vets could use wherever they were and whatever their time zone. That way, Planeta Hills became a dynamic resource for fast, direct communication with vets all across Russia. As part of the project, we made it possible to upload to the platform any materials considered useful for vets, including an anatomical atlas (a one-of-a-kind publication) and a prescription pad — a diet sheet that helped vets specify the right diet for an animal, improving its condition and speeding up recovery.

We also built a library on Planeta Hills where vets could download articles, publications, and reports on Hill's research confirming the clinical effectiveness of its products. A big part of the project was the calendar of educational events, built with help from Automatica. Integrating the calendar wasn’t easy: there were lots of events in different regions of Russia, on different topics. Before that, event information was sent to vets as links, QR codes, and social media posts, which wasn’t convenient.

With Automatica, we automated the process, and vets on Planeta Hills got access to a single event calendar. They could see highlighted dates with events, and clicking a date opened the location, time, and a link to the registration form. Vets could also check the agenda, the event schedule, and the speakers. A major win was bringing the regional teams together: each supervisor had their own account, and information from local accounts was automatically pulled into Planeta Hills, giving us one shared event calendar.

Planeta Hills also offered vets lots of materials for self-study. They could download anatomical atlases, posters, and research papers, and the site was integrated with social media and a YouTube channel called Hill's Vet Russia, which made vets part of a large database of 17,000 accounts. As a result, the project became a convenient and effective tool for working with the veterinary community.

The main idea behind Planeta Hills was to build vets’ loyalty to the company’s products. To do that, we needed to let vets try the products, so we developed a discount system that gave vets direct discounts on pet food. The Staff Feeding program was built into Planeta Hills from the start, so vets could keep records of their own pets and order products at deep discounts.

Planeta Hills also let us control product leakage through vet clinics. We knew many clinics were reselling products they had bought at a discount, which led to abuse. With the platform, we could see which pets belonged to vets, their breeds and ages, how often vets placed orders, and what feedback they left. In the end, Planeta Hills gave us not only a platform for ordering food but also a system for tracking statistics, which helped us work with vets more effectively and improve our service.