We are pleased to present episode 4 of our "3 questions" series, where we sit down each month with the leaders of ManoMano and learn about what has brought them to where they are today.

This month's episode is with Grégoire Hirtz, VP Delivery & Fulfillment.

Tell us about your time before ManoMano, and your role now as VP Delivery & Fulfillment.

Before joining ManoMano I worked in several different industries: the automotive industry (4 years), in consulting at McKinsey (8 years), at Amazon (4 years) in France and in the US, then in a logistics start-up (2 years). Through those different experiences, I discovered passion regarding operations, e-commerce, and people management, which brought me to ManoMano.
At ManoMano I'm in charge of operating the ManoFulfillment programme for our sellers. With my team, we operate 3 warehouses in France, Italy, and Spain where we receive products from our sellers, stock those products and prepare all the orders to be fulfilled.
Then, we manage the carriers who will deliver the product from the warehouse to the final customers. On top of operating this flow, we work a lot to ensure our fulfillment solution becomes more and more responsible.

What would you say to your younger self starting out his career in this sector?

With tech, the sky is the new limit.

What's the biggest challenge for logistics in the coming years?

The coming years will be really disruptive. Logistics has always been late compared to other sectors. It has just started its disruption, moving from fax and pallet handling to algorithm, big data, and item management. To add more fun, the disruption will also have to drive more environmentally friendly solutions. Obvious opportunities rely on scaling the preparation process (picking, packing).
Less obvious, rely on transforming the way we think about inbound flows: from suppliers to merchants to fulfillment centers. Those steps are still extremely manual and prone to errors.
Finally, the delivery flow is still the Far West and generates poor customer experience: 5 orders out of 100 are still late even with the best players, 2 orders out of 1000 are lost, 5-10 orders out of 1000 are broken, etc... The current challenge to generate disruption is the number of actors in the logistics chain: supplier, warehouse, first-mile carrier, middle-mile carrier, last mile driver, sorting hub, delivery hub, cities, etc... All those actors are trying to find their local optimum. Implementing an effective delivery chain will require aligning the objectives of the entire chain.
The opportunities are firstly, thanks to tech and data, we are more and more equipped to create transparency along the chain, and secondly, environmental constraints will make it mandatory to put everyone around the table.