Alstom

In their business project, Olivia Oudinot and Maya Dhanjal analyzed the opportunities for Alstom to explore the future of low-carbon mobility and how transportation can add value to the freight and logistics sector

The scope of the project was to assess the current freight and logistics context and environment, and any foreseen changes by gathering and analyzing available data. They divided the project in three phases: a preliminary analysis, data collection, and analysis of opportunities. Based on the preliminary analysis, and through our interviews, they were  able to identify the role key players of public transportation providers can play and what added value they can bring. 

Their project followed three detailed steps: 

Preliminary analysis

In order to assist the company, this group gathered all information available from primary and secondary materials they had on the freight and logistic sectors in order to conduct PESTLE and SWOT analysis. While PESTLE constitutes in an external analysis of the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental aspects in which the company operates in, the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis is a more internal and product/service based analysis. 

This state of play also included a description of available technology for mobility mentioning their strengths and weaknesses as well as a list of competitors and key stakeholders to seek out. 

Data collection

For this part of their consulting project, students reached out to 8 different interviewees from UPS, DHL, Schneider Electric, elQ Moblity, SNCF, Bouygues, CIVITAS and a representative of the city of Mississauga (Canada). These interviews allowed them to discover each organizations’ views on low-carbon transition and the role of public transportation in freight and logistic.

Opportunities analysis

From the two previous steps and further research on current business models, they created three main responsive actions.

Firstly, they established all key themes that pushes companies to trigger low-carbon transition for urban freights logistics (UFL).

Secondly, they issued decision-criteria on UFL to help companies to take the right decisions.

Lastly, they implemented two business models that worth developing to tackle those issues. 

Key conclusions and learnings

The duo concluded that freight & logistics sectors have several opportunities open to them, including the rise of e-commerce and multimodality, the decrease in privately owned vehicles. Transport companies should add value to freight & logistics by continuing to implement electrification, develop public-private partnerships and create multimodal apps.