29 June 2022 - Humanitarian & Key accounts, Transports & Logistics, Waste management & urban cleanliness
Interview with Capucine Martin, Sales Director at CLS Group’s Fleet Management Business Unit
Sales Director at CLS Group’s Fleet Management Business Unit since 2020, Capucine Martin has instilled a new approach to customer relations, based on improved synergies between the global group’s 900 employees and 34 sites worldwide.
Full of energy and fresh ideas, she reveals here her vision of the future for CLS’ projects and fleet management activities.
Capucine Martin, tell us about your background and how you came to CLSI trained as an Agricultural Engineer and started my career at Stef—a company specializing in temperature-controlled transport and logistics—where I was head of site quality and safety as well as transportation manager for some 40 drivers. It was during this four-year period that I discovered a penchant for customer relations. I then worked as Business Manager for an agricultural/agri-food software developer in Montpellier, before becoming Business Manager at Alten, the Toulouse-based leader in outsourced engineering and R&D.
I joined CLS in August 2020 as Sales Director at the business unit responsible for waste management, humanitarian and multimodal logistics services. My job is to understand the challenges facing our customers, to match our services to their needs, to make their lives easier and to boost their performance.
And I must say that helping to address the challenges of the future, such as humanitarian aid and waste collection, gives my work meaning.
The CLS Fleet Management unit was restructured in 2020, opting to focus on three strategic business areas in order to support stakeholders in the waste collection, humanitarian and multimodal sectors.
My initial goal was to rethink the services provided to customers, by considering not only their needs but also what our competitors are offering, and providing our users with high added value in what is an extremely competitive context. For all our markets, it is no longer enough to provide a simple geolocation system with a tracker and fleet management platform!
CLS has therefore expanded its offering to include tools such as the Navdroid tablet—essential for digital waste collection—and new features such as Book&Move for the optimization of humanitarian fleets. Determined to stay ahead of the competition, CLS is evolving fast and improving internal synergies with regard to its sales strategy, products and software development, so that it can respond quicker and more effectively to customers’ current and future needs.
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What are your global objectives?CLS specializes in satellite data, which is by definition about spanning borders. Ours is a global network, and with 34 sites worldwide we have a substantial geographic footprint and close proximity with our customers wherever they may be on the planet.
Concerning the aid sector, we are already active in more than 120 countries worldwide, while our waste collection services are about to be launched in Peru and Chile.
Digitization enables companies, local authorities and NGOs to analyze and manage their own activities. Faced with rising costs, they need to leverage digitization to identify new ways of improving either their margins, in the case of private companies, or their cost optimization in the case of public entities.
I strive to highlight the significant Return on Investment (ROI) provided by digitization. From fleet optimization and reduction, through predictive maintenance and the monitoring of tyre pressure and barge uncoupling, to responding to malicious acts, these applications all have a direct impact on users’ financial results. We know, for instance, that a TPMS sensor monitoring HGV tyre pressure extends tyre life by 50% and reduces fuel consumption by 18%.
In the waste collection sector, digitization can be used to optimize routing and fleet use and to monitor driver behaviour, hard braking, speed and acceleration in order to improve maintenance, enhance employee and user safety, and limit costs.
Continuous product improvement is an ongoing priority and for this we need to fully exploit all of our company’s skills and expertise. For instance, by combining satellite imagery with waste management services we could detect illegal dumping grounds so that local authorities can react quickly and without having to wait for complaints from users and law enforcement. The potential range of uses and applications is huge! CLS is truly unique in that it has a thorough understanding of both the capabilities of the space industry and the needs of users on the ground. All that’s left is to combine the two!
Managing waste from space enables us to clean up, not just our towns and countryside, but also our oceans and coastlines. The broad applicability of our solutions gives them a substantial environmental impact. We can even equip road sweepers with artificial intelligence cameras so that they analyze waste before passing.
Another example is the aid sector, where detecting the expansion of a refugee camp from space will soon make it possible to predict required numbers of on-site staff and vehicles. A road blocked by flooding means that aid convoys will have to be diverted, so receiving this information in advance is key to forward planning. The identification of climate incidents and droughts impacting crops and food supplies is also vital for humanitarian NGOs.
For the multimodal logistics sector, integrating our maritime security services can help improve the monitoring and surveillance of maritime fleets and transport operations. While in the building sector, we can envision synergies between energy and mining, fleet management and waste management services. There is still a world of possibilities!
