Les décodeurs de VoxLog : interview de Jean-Christophe Machet, président de FM Logistic

Indeed, next year we will have the great pleasure of celebrating our 50th anniversary. 50 years of business during which we have developed in transport, then warehousing, packaging, and today in supply chain. We have 21,700 employees working in 13 countries. 13 countries where we achieve over one billion euros in revenue. Our activities span the food, retail, cosmetics, luxury, industrial, and healthcare sectors. From the start, FM Logistic has always had a strong culture of innovation, which has further accelerated in recent years, notably with the establishment of an innovation directorate. Indeed, innovation is in the company's DNA for 50 years. It is a performance driver that allows us to improve our clients' supply chain. Three weeks ago, we gathered 50 of our international clients to discuss innovation challenges, where we addressed the Physical Internet during a roundtable. We set up a team, an innovation directorate, where we invest 10 million euros each year, both in R&D and in projects we launch on our platforms. Innovation allows us to improve our clients' supply chain, and also to reduce, very importantly, the physical strain at work. Innovation allows us to gain competitiveness and flexibility. We deploy innovation around three main axes: offer innovation, technological innovation, and social innovation. Regarding offer innovation, we have integrated the potential of digital and e-commerce to develop solutions around urban logistics, around City Login, but also intermediary platforms like Stock Booking or Click and Truck. In terms of technological innovation, we invest to gain competitiveness in our warehouses, in our packaging activities, by implementing AGVs, but also by integrating three-axis robots alongside our employees to make humans and machines cooperate, maintain flexibility, and gain competitiveness. And with our engineering teams, we have developed the Inventory Viewer, which will allow us to gain efficiency in our warehouse inventories. Finally, a topic we are very proud of, we invest in social innovation by setting up dedicated workshops for disabled workers on some of our platforms, and we have integrated teams like this in Orléans, soon in northern France. We have also made great efforts to train our employees by developing FM University and training 10 to 15 future site managers each year, who follow a training curriculum alternating classroom training on platforms with internal or external speakers. FM Logistic will create 750 permanent contracts this year, which is a good figure given the current economy.

Indeed, Isabelle, we are creating 750 permanent contracts this year in France. This is great news that normally all the specialized press, yes but also the generalist press, should echo. And yet we don't hear about it. How is it that we have this image deficit? Our peers, ourselves, the supply chain and logistics world in France creates thousands of jobs. There is an image deficit that is regrettable, because our activities, our jobs are increasingly attractive to younger generations. So today I want to call out not only the generalist press – thank you for giving me this opportunity – but also on the eve of important political deadlines, it will be interesting for the decision-makers of this country to take into account the natural assets that France has: due to its geographical location in Europe, due to its river network, but also its ports, we have formidable ports in the north and south of France. How can we and could we use our natural assets to make France a champion of international logistics, as the Netherlands have become?

Indeed, the logistics of tomorrow is to be invented. Our world is changing, our world is changing fast and quickly. The development of the BRICS, the concentration of inhabitants in cities, the development of e-commerce are all elements that will lead us to rethink the supply chain. Digital, e-commerce is changing the very structure of our clients' orders and of the consumer. If we can accelerate information flows and financial flows today, it is much more complicated to make physical flows follow at the same pace. So all the actors in the supply chain, but also the community, will have to rethink and deploy a more efficient supply chain going all the way to the consumer. Thus, I believe in the development of the collaborative mode. There are great champions each in their field and we will need, perhaps thanks to the Physical Internet, to succeed in making all the champions that we are cooperate, each in our domains, each in our geographies, to create an efficient and global chain. So to respond to that, we will implement technology. We talked about robotics, we can also talk about information technologies, digital. So all this technological universe constitutes a real platform. And obviously, what will be decisive for reinventing tomorrow's supply chain will be our men, our men and women who in our companies dream of the supply chain. And as I conclude this interview, I want to say to all the young women, young men who today ask themselves 'which sector should I pursue my career in?' I want to tell them: knock on the door of the supply chain actors that we are, whether shipper or logistics provider, to enter this sector and see how exciting it is, to see how every day we have the opportunity to rethink the supply chain of the 2020s, 2030s.

Thank you, Isabelle, and see you very soon.