Martynas Sarapinas: A Visionary Tacking Digital Challenges and Driving Technology towards New Fronts

Girteka Logistics is Europe's largest full truckload company with 20,000 employees and dedicated truck drivers working relentlessly, transporting around 1m loads annually for major business brands across Europe, Nordics, and Russia. When COVID-19 hit Europe, one company stood out as 'delivering perfection' and that is Girteka Logistics.

With a wide-reaching network, Girteka Logistics delivers high-quality services to various sectors including FMCG, Food & Seafood, Electronics, Excised goods, Pharmaceutical, Retail, Automotive, and Industrial Goods.

A Transformational Leader Breaking the Odds

Having joined as CIO and Executive Board Member just two years ago, the main challenge for Martynas Sarapinas was 'Delivering perfection' while facing a heavily scrutinized industry against the worst of the COVID-19 fallout and the turbulence caused. The company needed a rapid strategic pivot to a more innovative and sustainable business model that is a stepping stone towards mastering the digital edge.

Martynas believes that with strategic objectives of empowering business growth using technology and leadership through execution of strategy and organizational portfolio; sponsoring and catalyzing the group-wide digitalization program; leading operational excellence capabilities to build a culture of customer-centricity; leadership of Global Business Services setup for the Group.

Martynas brings a broad technology and transformation leadership experience from principal positions in financial & technology companies. He previously held positions like the First Vice President at Danske Bank, MobilePay (MobilePay is considered the No. 1 app in Denmark and the No. 2 strongest brand in Denmark within customer experience), and strategic transformational roles at Barclays Bank PLC.

He holds an MBA in Finance & Business Management, along with several executive education programs at Oxford Saïd Business School and Kellogg School of Management.

The Success Story of a Business Genius

Martynas was born into an entrepreneurial business family. He shares that ever since he was a child, he watched his parents invest a lot of time in doing various kinds of business activities. When he was 13 years old, he started his own business as he had a dream of buying a bicycle. It was a very successful commercial business that continued late into his teens. It has built up his love for dynamics, business, power of the network and he explored that further while studying for his bachelor's Business Management studies and MBA.

Martynas has mastered STEM and economical sciences early on. As he was doing exceptionally well at school as well as university, he was encouraged by lots of professors to explore various areas and topics. A book called "The Goal" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, given by a very well-regarded professor, built a deep obsession and a new passion for studying change management, project management, and organizational transformations for Martynas.

His professional career started in Barclays Bank Plc as a Project Management Assistant. It did not take long for him to develop further and at the age of 27, he had already amassed an extensive amount of experience and gained all possible certifications to lead transformation within the industry. He shared that some of the projects he was involved in were truly game-changing and he is grateful to the leaders, mentors, and coaches that stood by him during this exponential period of growth.

According to Martynas, life always has a way of providing us with amazing challenges and he has ventured into a very promising Danish startup – Mobile. He expresses, "Those 5 years were another important chapter for growth in regards to business but also for me as a leader. It felt like MobilePay came out of nowhere and became the No. 1 app in Denmark for several years with a market penetration as high as 80%+ and the No. 2 strongest brand in Denmark within customer experience (after LEGO). It was also a company that built the new face of finance for many private and SME businesses. During those years, I elevated my leadership to CIO level in terms of agile ways of leadership, high-performance teams, ability to lead an exponential growth for the business and handle uncertainty at a whole other level."

In the words of Martynas, there's no surprise, when the opportunity materialized to take a transformation challenge of a lifetime, he was completely and utterly ready for the journey with Girteka.

Devising Effective Strategies to Overcome Adversaries

Martynas classifies his primal challenges into three main categories.

Mentioning a famous saying "All strategies are worth nothing without execution", Martynas relates, "We truly had weak capabilities to execute the strategy and we needed to really 'sharpen the saw' and rebuild it practically from scratch while also doing it faster than ever before to get the low hanging fruits fast."

Adding to this, he states that when it is a utility-type business (logistics and transportation), there is a fight to have a decent ROI to keep everybody happy. This internal fight can be dangerous if there is a lack of determination and resolve to manage finance strategically. As a result, the whole technical infrastructure from the starting point was below his expectations and one can't accelerate digital transformation when they do not manage IT, SLA's area, which needs to be fixed with a future in mind. This led him to venture on a "fix IT" journey in haste.

Lastly, he talks about the third category, which is 'culture'. Culture is the king of changes and can consume leaders, strategies, and any initiatives, if not managed well. With Girteka, there is room for improvement in this area where all the clients and partners of the company are put at the center of everything.

Addressing the Must-have Attributes of CIOs

Martynas believes that in modern times, the role of the CIO is crucial, and it is impossible to imagine a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have a CIO, CTO, or CDO as a key executive in the main decision-makers team.

To lead and embrace changes with great velocity in the fast-moving, customer demands driven and constantly changing environment full of opportunities and significant challenges, here are some of the attributes that Martynas assumes every CIO needs:

• Business Acumen- Understanding business to the core and the industry, so that one can draw insights and bring opportunities, communicate with the board as well as other CxO's, bringing initiatives that help identify innovative revenue streams.
• Customer advocacy- It is fundamental for all successful businesses – to listen to the market and act fast. If necessary, be noticed across the board and speak on behalf of the clients.
• Merry tech & business. "The role of a technology leader is not to develop a digital strategy or vision—it is to embed digital in the business strategy" -Larry Quinlan, global CIO of Deloitte. Quoting this, Martynas says that CIOs cannot abandon the technology roots, which propelled them to the executive level, with the skills required to translate external pressures to business stakeholders.
• Emotional and leadership intelligence – In short, global hybrid working, different management techniques, agile leadership, and a day-to-day sense of your people is essential to be a person that leads and not just manages.

Embracing Industry Standpoints to Drive Innovation

Martynas mentions several fundamental challenges in the transportation industry well noted in the BGC report published in 2018 (link, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2018/why-road-freight-needs-go-digital-fast ).

• High Fragmentation, Low Transparency
• Underutilization of Assets & ineffectiveness in costs
• Outdated Customer Interfaces

Martynas presumes that he sees these as massive opportunities that can be improved to a considerable degree by bringing fintech alike customer interfaces that are in the market, new ways to plug the gaps in visibility, work with the platform – ultra-asset light business ideas, partnerships and utilize AI and RPA for improving asset utilization at a far greater level than it is in the industry.

Speaking about innovation, Martynas says, "To innovate, you must understand your own and the industry standpoints and where tech links the strategy and capabilities of the company. We chose to make changes in all areas mentioned previously. So far, we have +75% of Europe's operations planned with AI and this is the start of the revolution, as we see it. We, as No#1 trucking company and dreamer 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 340m EUR inflow revenue via digitally enriched orders from clients, which entails +60% growth YoY. On the sidelines, we also run 100+ robots and will invest even more towards different forms of automation shortly."

AI to Open a New Era of Technologies

Martynas truly believes that this is the world's crucial tipping point where AI will open a new era of technologies that are needed to work with. Adding to this, he compares the impact similar to one the internet caused back in the day.

He highlights that tech like IoT, intelligent enterprises backed by data, RPA, Cloud computing with SAAS, and others are fundamental to understanding not only the CIO leaders but also business leaders. All businesses are to a massive extent tech businesses as customers demand that and this requires steep learning and adoption of business lines to fit the ever-changing realities.

"Cyber security is an area of its own. My former leadership mentor had a good saying. It's like a snake… you can play with it, but it can also kill you one day. CIOs need to understand that it doesn't matter how well you do in terms of clients and business side of things, security is not something you can compromise on," Martynas claims.

Towards the Future With More Resiliency and Sustainability

Logistics and the whole supply chain will essentially be redesigned over the next decade or two, reveals Martynas. Many businesses learned the COVID-19 lessons the hard way and more resiliency and sustainability will be tied into the new design of the industry.

This leaves opportunities to improve ecofootprint and sustainability per service design also bringing electrification of logistical assets and dropping that 72% carbon emission contribution number to a way more manageable and acceptable level. He says, "Customers will not sleep on their expectations, which will grow to unprecedented demands – like same-day delivery, carbon-neutral service. We will be required to adapt and lead into the next decade. Uber-type experience will come about where ultra-asset light business models will win in the marketplace over the old-fashioned asset-heavy ones. This does not mean assets will be out of the equation but from the investor standpoint, the financial investment will back new agile business models that can be easily scaled and fit within the comfort of the market when the time comes".

Thumb Rules for Emerging Executives

Martynas mentions the three important tips for the budding or emerging CIOs/tech leaders/executives:

• Understanding the industry and business one is in, taking the lead, and not being a follower.
• Never leaving the fundamental tech roots that have brought one to where he is now but invest in creating a principal understanding of business and leadership to be a T-shaped executive at the decision table.
• Having a high ethical and leadership standpoint and merging them with your values so that you never have to fight against yourself and build a positive synergy with yourself.