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ECS Wiremind
ECS Group’s Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind Cargo join forces to launch CargoTech
GSSA (General Sales and Service Agent) ECS and flight optimisation technology firm Wiremind partnered to launch a new cargo-focused digital technology developer. The two companies through ECS’ Cargo Digital Factory solutions developer and Wiremind Cargo will launch independent digitalisation-focused company CargoTech, which aims to develop new digital solutions for the air cargo industry.
ECS GROUP
The largest integrated GSSA (General Sales and Service Agent) worldwide. GSSAs represent airlines to commercialise air freight capacity.
The company has over 95 subsidiaries and 153 offices spanning more than 50 countries.
WIREMIND
Wiremind is a leading Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of Revenue Optimisation and Inventory Management solutions, for the transportation (passenger and freight) and the sports & events industries.
The solutions offered by Wiremind are used by market leaders and offer a blend of artificial & human intelligence to handle very large datasets, the company asserts.
Wiremind was founded in 2014 and employs 50+ people in its head office in Paris.
France’s ECS Group’s Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind Cargo are coordinating their digital expertise under a new technologyfocused and autonomous company CargoTech.
With the launch of CargoTech, ECS Group’s inhouse solution developer, Cargo Digital Factory, and the French software and data-science company, Wiremind Cargo will focus their efforts on intelligently digitalising the air cargo industry, the company revealed through a press communique.
CargoTech also supports one of the four pillars of ECS Group’s new Augmented GSA concept, comprising Commercial, Technology, Sustainability, and New Abilities.
Based in Paris, France, Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind’s newly established dedicated cargo business unit will collaborate to digitalise as many air cargo processes as possible.
Cargo Digital products
Existing Cargo Digital Factory products such as its APOLLO BI & Reporting System, PATHFINDER Track & Trace solution, and QUANTUM pricing support system, and Wiremind Cargo’s shipment volume evaluation & flight planning system SKYPALLET, form the basis of CargoTech’s product portfolio.
The two divisions will jointly innovate and design additional digital solutions to expand the standard product portfolio, as well as tailor individual products for all actors of the cargo supply chain: airlines, GHAs, GSAs, and freight forwarders.
ECS Group and Wiremind have been business partners since June 2018. ECS became a customer of Skypallet in its early days and helped enhance the product as a key user. They both share a common vision and ambition to digitalise the industry in a way that removes complexity and manual work and focuses completely on the user experience, the press note continued.
“We believe that whatever can be digitised should not remain manual but are also aware that not everything can be automated. ECS Group offers solutions for both scenarios. Whatever requires human expertise is covered by our New Abilities portfolio, whereas CargoTech takes care of automating and digitalising routine processes to reduce costs and optimise revenues while fostering innovation,” explained Cedric Millet, CEO of CargoTech.
CEDRIC MILLET joined ECS Group in 2018 as Chief Strategy and Digital Officer of CargoTech to drive the transformation of the Leading GSA. Heading ECS’ cargo Digital Factory, he brings with him 22 years of experience and expertise in the air cargo business. He started his career with Air France Cargo who then became Air France-KLM Cargo.
After 13 years spent in the Franco-Dutch company (holding various positions in New York, Paris and Amsterdam), he joined Qatar Airways Cargo where he successively held the position of Vice-President, Cargo Revenue Management & Pricing based in Doha and Head of cargo – South Europe based in Paris.
Modular solutions
“Under the CargoTech umbrella, we will enhance and develop digital products both for the benefit of our existing ECS Group customers, as well as for all other airlines in the world. Our solutions are modular, and customers can subscribe to one or several products as required,” he added.
“Our intensified collaboration with Cargo Digital Factory will enable us to deliver more quickly on our vision of becoming a leading provider of end-to-end software solutions to the air cargo market,” asserted Nathanaël de Tarade, Chief Commercial Officer of Wiremind.
“Not only will we be taking SkyPallet to the next level, but we will also be introducing new products to the market that we are developing together,” he continued.
ECS Group is the world leader in GSSA business, serving airlines. in 2020 ECS Group carried over 1,100,000 tons on behalf of the airlines it represents and, in this way, contributes to their growth and development on the international stage in the air cargo sector.
Founded in 2014, Wiremind offers innovative SaaS Revenue Optimisation solutions for the transportation, logistics and events industries. Wiremind is a software and data-science company that believes in tools that mix business intelligence, applied mathematics, ergonomics and software intelligence to make sense of very large amount of data.
GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN jointly interviewed the high-power tag team comprising Cedric Millet, CEO of CargoTech and Nathanaël De Tarade, Chief Commercial Officer of Wiremind, for the low down on the partnership between the two companies and its implications. Global Supply Chain (GSC): ECS Group’s Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind Cargo have combined their digital expertise to conceive CargoTech. Why was it necessary to create CargoTech? Nathanaël De Tarade (NDT): For several reasons, cargo is most likely one of the least digitised industries.
Yet, we believe that the freight industry is ready now more than ever: we started to witness some significant developments before 2020, but the trend has significantly accelerated since the beginning of the pandemic.
Manual work is not good enough and not fast enough in an environment where things are changing overnight and where resources become scarce; CargoTech brings solutions to address this issue. Cedric Millet (CM): The need for digitalisation in the Air Cargo sector goes beyond what Cargo Digital Factory has done for ECS Group, and the solutions that Wiremind Cargo has already delivered. Today, we are just announcing the first step, which is the creation of CargoTech that is meant to welcome more players.
GSC: How is CargoTech more than the sum of its two parts? Give us the one-minute spiel on the new entity? NDT: CargoTech will generate synergies between the two brands. First of all, we are putting expert resources together who will coordinate their actions, so we definitely want one + one to equal to more than two.
NATHANAËL DE TARADE is one of the three Managing Directors and Co-founders of Wiremind, in charge of the SaaS (software as a service) activity for air freight.
He has been with Wiremind for 6 years, and before that, worked for 6 years at Air France-KLM Cargo, being based successively in Paris, Atlanta (USA), Singapore, and finally Paris again.
These resources are not only expert in technology, but they are also expert in the cargo business itself. People working in the Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind Cargo have more than 50 years’ experience in the air cargo industry between them.
This is a precious asset as these are precious and knowledgeable people who had experience in cargo sales, operations and revenue optimisation. They know what the processes are and how they should be improved.
Besides, CargoTech will foster the awareness of the products developed by one company to the customers of the products of the other companies (and vice-versa). This will help to accelerate the adoption.
GSC: Why is Wiremind Cargo a partner of choice for CargoTech? CM: We need to gather the experts where they are. There is no point starting from scratch if we can go faster by combining existing forces in a different way. NDT: The collaboration between ECS Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind Cargo has been designed not to target one small specific segment of the market, but to build a leading provider of solutions for the industry.
Both ECS and Wiremind Cargo have business and technology knowledge, but ECS will bring its expert business knowledge of the cargo processes while Wiremind Cargo will bring its technological expertise.
Another reason is that ECS’ Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind Cargo have complementary products: we do not have to go through a painful merge of software, and we are immediately in a position to offer a range of services to the market.
GSC: Give us a brief rundown of what current freight systems and processes you jointly plan to digitalise? NDT: We aim at offering a digital solution for every process that can benefit from technology. We are speaking about booking, pricing, quoting, tracking, planning, buildup, and more. Our current product portfolio is already significant and used by leading stakeholders worldwide, but when we talk with our customers and prospects, we see there are still plenty of areas that we can help them with.
GSC: What new innovative digital solutions do you plan to introduce in the foreseeable future? NDT: Some of the areas where we innovate and will keep doing so were mentioned just before, but to give you a couple of examples, we believe that pricing and capacity can substantially benefit from new technology.
We will soon unveil some of the things we have been working on, whether it is advanced pricing models, overbooking forecast, capacity and revenue optimisation, etc. with the single goal of helping our customers make the best of what they sell, which is space.
GSC: How significant is technology in the cargo transportation sector today? NDT: As expressed earlier, cargo digitalisation is just starting. Make no mistake however, our goal is not to digitise just for the sake of saying that we digitise; we actually have a motto that says that whatever can be digitised should not remain manual. However, we cannot automate everything. An essential aspect to keep in mind is that digitalisation also helps to address staff shortage, which is something known to many managers who have difficulties hiring experienced staff.
We believe digitalisation is useful when it brings added value in terms of revenues, cost and productivity.
Betting solely on manual work is not good enough in an environment where things are changing overnight and where resources become scarce. You have to be able to deliver more to scale when demand is high, and digital transformation is a great tool to help the industry do just that.
GSC: Can your combination of forces effectively a merger or acquisition? CM: CargoTech is a legal entity of its own and is being incorporated as we speak. It does not belong to either ECS Group or to Wiremind Cargo. It is an umbrella company, with shareholders that have invested equity in order to be able to buy some shares in various tech companies.
GSC: What happens to the identity of Cargo Digital Factory and Wiremind going forward? CM: These identities will remain. Once again, CargoTech is an umbrella company, with shareholding in various companies. Cargo Digital Factory has its own products, that will continue to be promoted and sold under that brand name. This is the same for Wiremind Cargo and its products.
We are not doing a marketing exercise by relabeling some existing products: we are combining forces that will improve the existing products and deliver new ones.
Every brand / company (Cargo Digital Factory, Wairemind cargo and others to join) will gave their own product line and road map (according to their expertise) that will be sold under the brand name that has developed it. Maybe one day these brands will disappear and be replaced by the CargoTech brand, but this is irrelevant for now.
GSC: Is your industry software available internationally? How are you faring overseas and what percentage of your revenues comes from outside France? NDT: The Air Cargo market is by essence international. Although our headquarters are in France, we have most of our business outside of France, by far. As we are addressing the entire industry and intend to be a leading provider, we have no reason to limit ourselves to a single region. We already have clients in all continents, our presence and scope is definitely worldwide.
GSC: How important is the Middle East for the ECS Group? CM: Every Region is important for ECS Group, including Middle East. But we are not talking about ECS Group and its GSSA business here, we are talking about CargoTech, the companies joining under its umbrella, and the ambition it has.
CargoTech has the ambition that its different brands (Cargo Digital Factory, Wiremind Cargo and more to join), will sell their existing and future Digital Solutions to airlines, GHAs, forwarders and other players in all the regions of the world.
GSC: What are your expansion plans for the region and internationally? CM: As indicated, CargoTech has the ambition that its different brands (Cargo Digital Factory, Wiremind Cargo and more to join), will sell their existing and future Digital Solutions to airlines, GHAs, forwarders and other players in all the regions of the world.
GSC: How is the ongoing pandemic impacting your business? CM: The pandemic has accelerated the need to digitalisation. People work remotely, and informal interaction has reduced between individuals. The use of digital solutions has become more important to support the new way of working.
Betting solely on manual work is not good enough in an environment where things are changing overnight and where resources become scarce. There is no other choice than to digitise.
GSC: Are you eyeing any further mergers or acquisitions in the future? CM: In the technology sector, there will definitely be more collaboration. CargoTech will be welcoming new players very soon. Stay put for more announcements to come.
GSC: What is the bigger vision for CargoTech with its new identity? CM: We have a very modest and pragmatic approach, but a big ambition. We created the foundation by putting together two actors of the cargo and technology sectors that have existing products. These actors will be developing new digital solutions based on their expertise, and there will be new companies joining the Cargo Tech soon.
We want everyone to understand CargoTech as an enabler and accelerator of the Digitalisation and Innovation in the airfreight industry. It will have several brands, with different products.
GSC: Any other consideration to share? CM: Stay put for more announcement on the next joiner in CargoTech. Watch this space!
