New technology and innovation is essential and the only way forward is to embrace the future, according to ECS Group chief executive officer, Adrien Thominet.
He believes that companies must embrace digitalisation, disruption, e-business, revenue management, and feel at home using the “cloud” to remain successful into the future, saying: “We have no choice other than going through”.
Thominet says this benefits customers, telling Air Cargo Week: “Being born in the Cloud really helps us to deliver to our customers not only a much wider range of integrated services than before, but also to provide the performance of tomorrow and of course, bringing more transparency to our airlines.”
By outsourcing to a GSSA, airlines are able to turn fix costs into variable ones but Thominet says there is more it than that, hence the need to innovate.
He explains: “Even if, the GSSA concept remains an important component of the outsourcing needs for the carrier, at ECS we had to position ourselves as innovative and new added value services providers. We are fully determinate in delivering and developing sophisticated solutions and services and innovative solutions.”
ECS also offers the advantage of being the only large GSSA structure fully integrated under one name and organisation.
Thominet says: “By joining us, airlines are facing a new way to consider all the freight experience: we bring them synergies, solid and global network, security and of course more technologies: business intelligence, tracing, any kind of information regarding the cargo.”
ECS has been busy increasing its global coverage through acquisitions, such as AVS, giving it a presence in 11 Asian countries.
New offices have opened in Latin America and ECS made an alliance with Canada’s Exp-Air Cargo, and these will all be integrated into the network this year.
The air cargo industry started picking up again towards the end of 2016, and has been growing in 2017, with pharmaceutical and e-commerce proving strong, and Thominet is confident this will continue into the future.
ECS has built up a new internal structure to match the evolving market, Thominet says: “E-commerce, new technologies, future are now part of our organisational chart and people are fully devoted to bring added value services and rethink, reinvent GSSA and create new business models.”
ECS remains committed to improvement and innovation, as Thominet puts it: “We have to reinvent our core business. We have to chase for greater and I really think that our “ECS squad” is determined to modernise the skies.”