La Grande Interview : Jean-Christophe Machet, Président du groupe FM Logistic

Hello Jean-Philippe. Indeed, with 10% growth last year, 15% organic growth this year, and many other challenges, number one is to integrate, train, and develop human resources. Today in France, but everywhere in Europe, we have difficulties facing our development by recruiting talents in this new profession. It concerns all functions, or are there particular functions that are difficult? All functions are concerned. Operational functions are extremely numerous since we will recruit more than 700 employees in France this year, 3000 in the group. We will have operators, managers, IT specialists. We also need to develop people capable of managing production units, men and women who will intervene in innovation. So it's across all professions. And it's true that this is not a phenomenon that only affects FM Logistic; it's a phenomenon that affects all logistics players.

Logistics is perhaps unknown, and in any case probably has an image deficit. All supply chain actors, our colleagues, the providers, we have to face this deficit of attractiveness of our sector. Even though we offer career progression, internal training, even though logistics was not known yesterday because logistics was the invisible hand that made the product go from factory to warehouse to shelf, and consumers didn't ask how the product arrived. Today, supply chain is part of our daily lives. We who buy on the internet, at the end of each act, we have to decide how we get delivered. So it's an opportunity that will probably make our sector more attractive to young people, to talents, to face this challenge of transformation that we have.

We need to show ourselves as we are. Supply chain professions are exciting, they move, evolve, integrate a human dimension and a technological dimension. It's the combination of information flows with physical flows. And perhaps all actors need to communicate more about our profession, about development opportunities, open the doors of our companies, as we try to do at FM, but not only. All our colleagues must also go more towards the student world, as we do when we organize the FM Challenge, where last year 600 students participated in a challenge on how connected objects will impact supply chain tomorrow.

Indeed, certainly the political world should understand that supply chain can become a real industry in France. Supply chain and logistics service providers can become a leading force. I am convinced of that. We need to come together - states, organizations, partners, and logistics providers - to combine our forces and go to cities and regions with 15% unemployment. It's a collective responsibility we have with public authorities to go to these populations in difficulty, without activity, and show them that there is a light. That light is our logistics activities. We create jobs. There are 20,000 jobs waiting for candidates today in logistics. We will create, I think, 110,000 jobs in France this year across the profession. So we need to build this bridge between men and women looking for activity and the professional world for our activities. I was discussing with a colleague very recently: we first need men and women who join us with desire and courage, and then thanks to our internal training structures, we can develop skills. We develop them in life. So as a business leader, as a citizen of our beautiful France, I would like us to help these 500,000 young people under 25 who are unemployed today. I would like to help them, at least in part, to cross the street to find a job. I am ready, we are together, I would be ready to say that the 750 jobs we will create this year in France, and again next year, we reserve them for these young men and women without activity. And these 500,000? 1,100 activities? We integrate them and train them to find a new profession. But the company alone cannot do this. We need cooperation from the relevant ministries, the Ministry of Labor, to find mechanisms and cooperate between state and company to set up this bridge.

Because supply chain comes from transport, it's a profession that is unknown, sometimes associated with nuisances. We are very far from that today. Transport today, green logistics, it is innovative and technological. So we, the supply chain community, are very proud to be part of it. We need to make this profession known. We must also meet with elected officials to explain how supply chain is structuring. And we have a good example to take, perhaps from the Netherlands. I invite public authorities to look at how the Netherlands made supply chain and logistics one of their industries. They oriented infrastructure development, legal development, promotion of supply chain professions. They made it a national cause. So we all know that logistics contributes significantly to value creation in the Netherlands. I want to say: let's do that. We have ports, highways, a geographical position at the heart of Europe that is an undeniable asset. Let's make supply chain and logistics a national cause. Because what we often forget is that supply chain jobs are close to the consumer. Our logistics activities in France are durably anchored in France because supply chain aims to serve the consumer, so we must be as close as possible to that consumer. So we are on French territory.

You are right, and that is the beauty of our profession, at least that's how I feel it. We have thousands of employees across all logistics providers who started in logistics through operations, then moved into management, leading teams, becoming profit center managers, and then learning the trade, and eventually sometimes joining support teams, project teams, innovation teams. And that is often unknown. You are right. I myself, we have about ten business unit managers of 300-500 employees who joined us as team leaders, and we have some who joined us as drivers or forklift operators. Our profession allows that. I must say it's a pride for each of us to participate in that. And it's a common denominator for all providers, not just FM. It's really specific to all providers. We develop through our training schools, FM University, which allows us to develop curricula to train our patrols, our stock managers, and to train our IT specialists in logistics, for example.

Yes, indeed, and digital, imagine to what extent digital is transforming our profession, both in the offer we bring to our clients through e-commerce, but also through the transformation of our processes. So today, digital transforms through the integration of data scientists in our company to use big data and think about how to use big data to optimize physical flows, to rationalize processes and costs. But digital, through innovation, will lead us to develop tools, for example drones that will allow us to do inventories, or work with partners to develop tools for preparation that will accompany our employees in packaging workshops, to assist them in the most complex and difficult tasks. So we are recruiting engineers. We have R&D teams through open innovation; we cooperate with researchers and external partners to mobilize a whole community focused on how to operate this profession tomorrow with greater efficiency and by mobilizing new technologies. So indeed, we recruit new profiles who have a playing field that is currently virgin and developing in companies. It's hard to imagine that the warehouses, the large platforms we see along roads and highways, will become... and yet it is. And we were just talking about our elected officials who sometimes know the profession a little. On our platforms, we have between 300 and 1000 employees. We invest in equipment each year, more than 60 million euros at FM, and that will increase since we are on several projects averaging 5 to 10 million each, which will lead us to integrate new technologies to be in the cooperation between robot and man. So we will ensure that our teams are on the noble tasks of our profession, whether physical or intellectual, and we will mobilize robots for tasks that are more repetitive, more constraining, on physiological and health aspects. Thank you.