"Projects like TradeLens and GSBN are a good example of our openness to ecosystems"

François Bottin: "CMA CGM did not discover digital technology when the Digital Factory was founded in July 2017. Many digital projects were already being carried out in order to transform the Group. However, we had to structure ourselves to ensure the optimal functioning of the existing information system and oversight of new projects. Rodolphe Saadé, Chairman and CEO of the CMA CGM Group, has, as part of its digital transformation strategy, decided to create a team dedicated to digital projects: the Digital Factory."

François Bottin: "The ambition was clear. We decided to enhance the value our in-house experts and we launched the Digital Factory with 40 motivated people from the Group. Its scope is wide: IoT, Blockchain, datascience, but also API, and the responsibility to transform working and collaboration methods. We were able to lead the deployment of Office365 for 30,000 people worldwide, while managing the support for change."

François Bottin: "Our desire to be open is twofold: to better collaborate with our regional entities (the Group is present in 160 countries), also with the Marseille territory and its ecosystem (via for example the SMART PORT in Med program), and also to call on the expertise of external services through our partners. To illustrate the first case, historically the CMA CGM information system of was centralized, whether it was for financial management or for our core business, shipping. Everything was managed from our headquarters in Marseille. This corresponded to a coherent IT objective in the early 2000s but which had to evolve with the DIGITAL transformation. In fact, each Group entity today has the opportunity to implement high-performance Digital solutions independently of the head office (cloud hosting, call for start-ups to deliver solutions at a lower cost, etc.). We want to avoid that and ensure an overall coherence of the proposed solutions. This is one of the missions of the Digital Factory. For example, we have defined the methods and rules for the development of APIs. Our regional entities or subsidiaries that wish to set up APIs can do so without being dependent on head office resources. We are thus improving time-to-market by increasing our Digital Solutions delivery capabilities."

François Bottin: "Recent examples clearly illustrate our openness and our work in the ecosystem, including our participation in TradeLens and GSBN projects. Another example; the CMA CGM Group is also actively involved in the SMART PORT program. Its aim is the transformation of the port of Marseille Fos in order to make it more attractive and innovative.

This year, the Smart Port Challenge brought together large companies and start-ups from the SUD/PACA region to develop new projects and experiments. In particular, with the start-up Navalgo we presented a solution to reliably predict the exit date of ForETA containers from the terminal."

François Bottin: "For TradeLens, our logic was to declare that we had to be adventurous from the beginning in order to be able to influence the development of this new operational axis for the ecosystem. But more generally, it is a sign of the overall transformation of our business. This platforming movement is in fact accompanied by an imperative: to work on new differentiators, on new value-added services. In the maritime transport sector, competition was exacerbated during the concentration period we experienced a few years ago. Today however, all the experts agree that this horizontal concentration movement is over. The excellence in our core business which is maritime transport is there. We must therefore develop new and differentiated services for our customers."

François Bottin: "Price lists, ship schedules... As is the case in every industry, data becomes a strategic issue. We need to enhance their value more effectively and create value for our customers. This explains our interest in smarter containers, thanks to the IoT on which we are innovating  in association with Traxens (a Marseille start-up that recently raised 20 million Euros and in which CMA-CGM is a shareholder, editor's note). With these, we can in real time recover the data of shocks to containers or the composition of their interior atmosphere... So much information that is valuable to our customers. More generally, this global transformation of our business also represents new ambitions for the company. Thus, Rodolphe Saadé's desire is to become a global logistics operator, including  on land,  as is proven by the acquisition of Ceva Logistics at the beginning of the year."

François BOTTIN, Director Digital Factory : "As is the case in every industry, data becomes a strategic issue. We need to enhance their value more effectively and create value for our customers."

François Bottin: "We had to conduct a number of structuring projects. Within the Digital Factory, we created a team of 10 people dedicated to a new API Factory. The mastery of APIs is essential to enable interconnection between our information system and new platforms such as TradeLens. But that is not enough. We also launched an overhaul of the historical architecture of our information system to move to a microservices logic. Like many large companies, we had a fairly rigid system to which we had to bring some agility. From a very modular microservice operation, it becomes possible to quickly modify certain parts of the information system without impacting the rest. This is what makes it easy to interconnect with internal players, such as our commercial or external forces, for our partners and for the new services offered to our customers."

Source : Article published by Alliance, Le Mag > http://bit.ly/2qrOxjF