GEODIS Data journey

How critical is Data in the achievements of the Group’s ambitions?

The transport and logistics ecosystem is experiencing a peak in the volume of interactions. In a context of business activity growth, GEODIS has successfully kept the pace and enjoyed a 28% revenue growth from 2020 to 2021*. The Group intends to pursue that momentum and remain a leader driven by a strong spirit of continuous innovation, with a focus on digital transformation. Data will play a decisive part in achieving these ambitions.

The more activities we carry out, the more data is produced, making its management critical – that alone is a challenge. Increased competition is another one: taking advantage of all our data to better understand our ecosystem and market will be key to enable our teams to seize new opportunities in a tense competitive context.

Competition is also evolving, new business models brought up by pure digital players are emerging. They challenge us to reinvent our own ways of doing business. Data once again will be essential to face this new competition. It opens a wide range of new opportunities for innovation, allowing us to become true accelerators for our partners. We will strive to create a closer relationship with them, understand their needs while making it easier to do business with us. This calls for a more transparent ecosystem to share our data and strengthen our bonds through seamless and intelligent interactions.

Data will also be at the heart of our ability to engage in a more sustainable growth, providing key insights to measure and reduce our environmental impact, especially our carbon footprint.

What part shall the CDO play in that transformation?

At GEODIS, there is a huge potential to harness; since our rich ecosystem and worldwide operations cover all supply chain activities, we have a tremendous amount of data that can and must be used to build smart decisions and improve interactions and customer experience.

My role is to find the best ways and provide the right means to trigger data-driven decisions, guide the Group on this journey and leverage the full potential of data.

This journey starts with setting up the Data Foundations.

How important are these foundations?

Data might be plethoric but has no value without a strong underlying governance & management framework that secures its understanding, harmonizes its usage and ensures its quality across the Group.

Failure in delivering new use cases often comes from poor data mastering. Data Governance & Management are the foundations for data valorization: define and share principles, policies and procedures is a key step for the Data Office to foster new analytics use cases and business models.

In that regard, we successfully partnered with Capgemini Invent, whose data experts have helped us set up and drive key initiatives, such as some key projects to manage and govern the Group’s master data.

What can we expect from data valorization for GEODIS?

Leveraging data potential offers a wide range of decisive improvements: opening new markets, strengthening our bond with external stakeholders (suppliers, customers, partners, etc), improving operational efficiency...

GEODIS has already started to develop innovative projects such as our eLogistics offer, conceived to meet customers’ expectations, and help them grow in e-commerce, leveraging our advanced order sourcing and execution platform.

The Upply marketplace launched in 2018 is another promising initiative, the company intends to capitalize on its position as the European leader in benchmarking and expects a rapid growth.

Our partnership with Capgemini Invent allows us to leverage the most recent trends, identify and harness more key data-enabled opportunities, while working on core business projects.

Overall, it’s important to point out that everyone at GEODIS shall be entitled to seize the opportunities brought by data, at every level. In that regard, the creation of a data hub makes data a common asset within the Group from which to build shared use cases across Businesses and Functions.

In your opinion, what would be the key challenge in this transformation journey?

The first key milestone is that data culture takes hold within the Group. It’s a paradigm shift that everyone in the group should grasp. Along with Capgemini Invent, we’re progressively raising awareness on how data underpins and drives everyone’s activities.

What would GEODIS look like as a data driven company in the future?

We need to move towards an transparent ecosystem with intelligent interactions with our partners and customers, offer all our partners a seamless and simple business experience with us. An ambitious initiative was launched to promote a common language based on market standards and will be instrumental in building transparent interactions between the group and its partners.

Data will be a critical lever to drive the transformation towards more sustainable activities: quality data is required to understand and reduce our impact to meet our ambitious goal to reduce by 30% GEODIS emissions by 2030.

There are great thrilling challenges ahead, and we will welcome with open arms all of those who will join us in them.

* Constant perimeter and change rate