In his role as Low-carbon Business Development Manager at VINCI Facilities Sud Centre Est, Nicolas Galet is spearheading a new model incorporating customer-focused decarbonisation in its business units’ activity. His preferred method? Team spirit.
If Nicolas Galet has a watchword, it is “team”. Understandably so for this former high-level footballer who spent many years at his local club, Amiens SC. And teamwork is a key part of the position he has occupied since January 2021. As Low-carbon Business Development Manager at VINCI Energies France – Facilities Sud Centre Est, Nicolas Galet leads a network of experts in a new field: carbonologists or carbon managers.
He and his team devised this VINCI Energies-trademarked term for a brand-new role, the purpose of which is to accelerate decarbonisation in the field. Nicolas Galet explains that “The long-term objective is for every employee in our business units to assimilate our current low-carbon approach so it can be offered to all our customers for their own decarbonisation. The collective dimension of this approach is essential to its success, and networking is a crucial part of it.”
These are precisely the benefits of the decentralised, network-based approach at VINCI Energies that convinced him to join the Group seven years ago. “I had been working at Eiffage for around nine years,” he recalls, “And I had been recruited there straight from my engineering studies. As a methods engineer, then a business and key accounts manager, I learned all about every aspect of the business, especially the importance of keeping up with the order book and of customer relationships. But after some organisational changes at Eiffage, the decision pathway became less fluid. It made things less interesting.”
New unit of measurement
It was then that VINCI Energies approached him to become head of the business unit Actemium Lyon Process Solutions. “I was not only fortunate enough to receive a year of support from the outgoing business unit manager, who was retiring, but as well as having regained autonomy in running a business unit, I discovered the power of the VINCI Energies network, a completely different way of working from the more top-down Eiffage model.”
“Industrialising a low-carbon approach so it can be assimilated by all our employees and offered to our customers”
Nicolas Galet would take full advantage of this organisational model based on collective action in the new mission his line manager offered him in late 2020. Having reached the end of a five-year cycle at Actemium, Nicolas Galet received an offer from Pierre-Yves Dehaye, CEO of VINCI Energies France – Facilities Sud Centre Est, for a “visionary project” to make carbon the new unit of measurement for business activity while retaining a resolutely commercial focus.
Visionary and revolutionary: “The idea is to move away from a cost-based approach, which inevitably discourages business unit managers, toward a focus on the profits and advantages to be gained. We therefore needed to create a commercial dynamic around this low-carbon approach. It needed to be invented from the ground up. I didn’t hesitate at all.”
Exemplary and proactive approach
As a pioneer for carbonologists, Nicolas Galet first had to establish a strategy through extensive experimentation, then in close collaboration with his sales director colleague Alexandre Arnoux. This phase of listening to our business units’ customers was a crucial step in building a network of experts.
There are now 50 of these experts, some full-time, others sharing their new assignment with their operational role (operational efficiency engineer, energy efficiency engineer, QSE engineer, project manager, sales manager or operational support engineer), all of whom have trained with the carbon training institute IFC in measuring and establishing a carbon footprint.
“We have a double mission to lead by example and be proactive in terms of carbon,” says Nicolas Galet. “The first involves performing systematic carbon measurement across all our contracts, for which we have our P2C (contract carbon profile) tool. Based on this data, we implement a continuous improvement plan, acting on our choice of suppliers, our modes of transport, the types of raw materials we use, waste management, etc. In terms of carbon proactivity, through our carbonologists, we aim to make our resources and skills available to our customers and offer them low-carbon solutions in their businesses and economic areas.”
The carbonologist’s skill lies in finding the angle that enables them to review a customer’s strategy and initiate a decarbonisation process. It is a balancing act that our engineer finds very rewarding: “Carbon support is a jumping-off point for addressing all the other environmental issues such as water, the circular economy and biodiversity. The appeal of this role is the real impact it has on transforming business models, on our employees, on our customers and ultimately, on the planet.”
10/19/2023
