Pedro Martinho: Why a Logistics Director Must Love the Customer, Not Just the Numbers

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało talks with Pedro Martinho, a longtime board member of the Eurocash group (including Frisco), about the role of logistics in growing a retail business. They discuss how a retail company's board should think about logistics, and about digital transformation and the competencies needed to run it well.

LOGISTICS AS COST VERSUS LOGISTICS AS QUALITY

The most commonly underrated challenge at board level: focusing solely on logistics costs while sidelining quality. Board discussions more often concern budget variances than whether customer service is actually working well — because a blown budget triggers immediate alarm, while weaker service quality "escapes notice" until it escalates into customer loss.

THE LAST PERSON TO TOUCH THE PRODUCT

In e-commerce, the warehouse worker picking an order is the last person at the company to have physical contact with the product before it reaches the customer. Frisco deliberately chose to keep transport in-house rather than outsourcing it to an external company, precisely because the driver is the company's only live human contact with the customer — people make repeat purchases because of the relationship and quality of service, not just because the product meets spec. Adapting your own vehicles to the specifics of the goods (temperature zones, racking for specific containers) improves quality and cost at the same time — because control over the whole chain, from goods receipt to delivery, lets you optimize it as a whole, instead of risking a saving in one silo raising the cost of the total.

THE TRAP OF LOOKING AT COSTS IN SILOS

A real example: a building-materials company was analyzing warehouse, transport, and customer-service costs separately, asking why the warehouse couldn't be 10-15% cheaper, without factoring in that the spare capacity it maintained enabled accepting orders fulfilled into the late hours — a genuine competitive advantage. Only looking at it from the customer's perspective revealed that "cheaper" would mean losing exactly what set the company apart from competitors.

HOW TO TELL REAL INNOVATION FROM TECH FASHION

A real example of a costly mistake: a company deployed a blockchain-based product-tracking system for 250,000 euros, running for a year and a half already — with no measurable business benefit. Blockchain makes sense in narrow niches requiring strict control over raw-material provenance (pharma, some manufacturing sectors), but for most organizations it's mostly marketing, not real value. Proven innovations with a real business impact, on the other hand, include: a revolution in last-mile flexibility (many ways to reach the customer, lowering the viability threshold for serving previously unprofitable segments), full warehouse automation (cutting headcount by 80% while raising picking accuracy to practically 100%), and "passive cooling" — cooling vehicles without fully refrigerating them, lowering the cost of transporting fresh products over longer routes.

THREE COMPETENCIES NO ONE HAS ALL AT ONCE

A good logistics director has to be, at the same time: a great people manager (the industry is still very labor-intensive — a distribution center is often 400+ people, requiring, among other things, adapting infrastructure to a growing share of women on teams following the influx of refugees from Ukraine), a strong analyst (because differences counted in cents per unit multiply across millions of transactions into real amounts on the P&L), and someone with excellent relationships with other departments (sales, marketing, production) and genuine care for the customer. Finding someone with all three traits at once "borders on a miracle" — the recommendation is to consciously choose which two competencies to keep in-house and which to supplement with external consulting on specific projects.

THREE RULES OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

First, digital transformation isn't a goal in itself — it has to follow from the company's strategy, measured by business metrics, not technology metrics. Second, the real challenge isn't the technology (readily available, many vendors), it's changing mindset and organizational culture. Third, transformation has to be an "orchestra" — if one department digitizes while others stay manual, the result can be worse than the starting point: more chaos and friction for the customer than benefit, because no one in the organization understands the whole process anymore.