The largest FTL (Full Truck Load) transportation company in Europe, Girteka, employs Martynas Sarapinas as its Chief Information Officer and Executive Board Member.
His responsibilities include all technological and engineering tasks, organisational projects and strategy implementation, operational excellence, shared service centre leadership, and customer centricity for more than 20.000 devoted workers.
Martynas received the Impact Award 2020 for European Technology Leader of the Year in 2021. He was also a Top 5 finalist in the CTO Lithuania elections.
Below are highlights of the interview:
Tell us about your journey and what did you do before starting your professional career?
I was born into an entrepreneurial business family. I share that ever since I was a child, I watched my parents invest a lot of time in doing various kinds of business activities. When I was 13 years old, I started my own business as I had a dream of buying a bicycle. It was a very successful commercial business that continued well into his teens. It has built up my love for dynamics, business, and power of the network, and I explored that further while studying for my bachelor’s in Business Management studies and MBA.
I started STEM and economic sciences early on. As I was doing exceptionally well at school as well as university, I was encouraged by lots of professors to explore various areas and topics. And the areas that built a deep obsession and a new passion in my first years at university were related to studying change management, project management, and organisational transformations.
Within heart and soul, I am a technology and transformation leader and has been on the front lines of the finance and fintech sectors’ leading digital transformations for the last decade. I have been lucky to start my professional career at Barclays Bank, where I first started as a project management assistant and later became Head of PMO, leading and shaping many strategic initiatives, which have formed his transformation management hard skills toolbox.
My previous tech director role in Mobile was rewarded by industry awards as well as mastering the best of private and business sectors and customer experience leadership in the market. All those experiences combined have brought him to where I am today.
What was the motivation behind joining Girteka?
Compared to finance, insurance, retail, and online industries, transportation & logistics was (and still is) far behind many best practises in digitalization, customer experience, and industry excellence, and he was fully aware of this early in 2019, when he met up with leaders from Girteka.
Their informal talks over a period revealed an interesting company that had the genes and DNA for substantial growth, leading size and scalability. It did not take very long for him to realize that adding his part of the puzzle could make a major impact not only on the company but also on the whole industry. When the company started seriously discussing a transformation, his name was already on the shortlist for a chat over coffee.
Tell us more about the company’s offerings.
Girteka is Europe’s largest road transportation gateway that connects around 1 million full truck loads annually between major global business brands and its customers in Europe, the Nordics and East.
With a wide-reaching network, Girteka delivers high-quality services to various sectors, including FMCG, Food & Seafood, Electronics, Excised Goods, Pharmaceuticals, Retail, Automotive, and Industrial Goods.
What are your major roles and responsibilities at the company?
As CIO and Executive Board Member, I am responsible for change initiatives that the company needs to take as it moves towards the future.
I believe that with the strategic objectives of empowering business growth using technology and leadership through execution of strategy and organizational portfolio; sponsoring and catalysing the group-wide digitalization program; leading operational excellence capabilities to build a culture of customer-centricity; and leadership of the Global Business Services setup for the group.
As a CIO, have you established clear IT priorities that everybody can get behind?
Absolutely, this is a core aspect of any leader, and those priorities are tightly related to customer advocacy and building a customer-centric business culture, humanizing technology to drive and excel business value, and building solid data foundations for next chapter growth.
What significant changes have happened in the IT sector in the past years, and which modern technologies have disrupted it?
I am looking at the market from a tech and business leader’s perspective, and today I put my logistics perspective on.
In the logistics industry, there are several fundamental challenges that tech changes can really reshape:
- High Fragmentation, Low Transparency
- Underutilization of Assets & ineffectiveness in costs
- Outdated customer Interfaces
- Insufficient drive for sustainability
I presume that I see these as massive opportunities that can be improved to a considerable degree by bringing fintech-like customer interfaces that are in the market, new ways to plug the gaps in visibility, working with the platform-ultra-asset light business ideas, partnerships, and utilize AI and RPA to improve asset utilization at a far greater level than it is currently in the industry.
Speaking about innovation, I believe, “To innovate, you must understand your own and the industry’s standpoints and where technology links the strategy and capabilities of the company.” We chose to make changes in all the areas mentioned previously. We have all Europe’s operations planned with AI, and this is the start of the revolution, as we see it. We, as the No#1 trucking company and dreamers of Top#10 Logistics, see that as a fundamental operational advantage. Over time, we created new interfaces between clients and ourselves, and this resulted in more than 400 million EUR inflow revenue via digitally enriched orders from clients, which entails +60% growth YoY. On the side-lines, we also run 130+ robots and will invest even more towards different forms of automation shortly.” that drive leadership in costs.
Modern IoT and cloud platforms also allow us to tackle the sustainability agenda well. We managed to show this case this year in a joined case study between IKEA, Transporeon, and Girteka with a –27% improvement in emission reduction accounting by enabling real data to be shared and reported. And we still see a huge learning potential for the next step to take on sustainability.
On big trends, Martynas truly believes that this is the world’s crucial tipping point where AI will usher in a new era of technologies that are needed to work with. Adding to this, he compares the impact to one the internet caused back in the day.
What has been the best recognition that you have received as a professional?
I am a believer that if you do well as a leader, your team and results will speak on your behalf. I was proud to hear that in the local market there is a lot of talk about the change we are making as a company, and this does signal that the right culture change is happening.
My team has recently taken a 2nd year in a row No. 1 award where Girteka was recognized as “Most Visible – Real Time Visibility – Carrier in Large Carrier Category” across 130 thousand carriers in Europe. This very much signals that we are already at the right level and that the technology transformation that started 2.5 years ago is in shape to keep moving us forward.
I was surprised and delighted at the same time to win the Technology Leader of the Year Europe-Impact Award by GDS in 2020. All of these things signal that we are on the right path.
Where do you see yourself and the company in upcoming years?
I believe that the role of the CIO is crucial, and it is impossible to imagine a Fortune 500 company that does not have a strong market leaving the CIO, CTO, or CDO.
I do see myself successfully delivering the changes that are in flight to boost our company’s standing in customer experience, digitalization, business value creation, sustainability and reaching public goals we are committed to. This is what we call Responsible Logistics. When that chapter is closed, I will focus all my attention on new adventures in a Fortune 300 company as a C-level tech and transformation leader.
