100% compliant routes in under a month: interview with Mickael Ott, Logistics Manager at Georges
- July 6, 2026
- 3 mins
Kardinal: Hello Mickaël, could you introduce yourself and Georges?
Mickaël Ott: Hello, I’m Mickaël Ott, Logistics Manager at Georges for the past three years. I’m responsible for managing our vehicle fleet, which represents a large part of my role, as well as optimizing our transport operations at a national level. In short, I manage the delivery and collection routes across all our sites.
Georges is an industrial laundry founded in 2017 in Bordeaux, specializing in the maintenance of workwear and PPE, with very specific washing standards and techniques: maintenance, decontamination, repair, recycling, it’s a complete cycle that we manage. Last year we laundered 2 million garments, which we deliver to more than 4,500 locations every week from our 11 production sites across France.
K: What are the logistics challenges Georges is facing?
M.O.: As Georges has grown, the logistics complexity has inevitably exploded. We now have around 120 routes departing per week, both delivery and collection routes. But the difficulty doesn’t only come from our 4,500 delivery points or our 2 million garments laundered per year. The complexity also comes from constraints specific to each client: different service times depending on the site, individual access requirements, opening hours, shift changes for factories working 3 shifts, lunch breaks during which we cannot operate. All of this makes planning our routes increasingly complex.
Internally, we have our own regulations: a maximum of 10 working hours per day for a driver. And on top of that, we want profitable routes with low carbon emissions. That’s a lot of constraints that we were no longer able to manage manually.
K: How did planning work before Kardinal?
M.O.: All planning was done by hand using Excel files, with Google Maps or Michelin Maps running alongside to retrieve travel time information and estimated costs including tolls. It was quite complicated and very time-consuming.
Building a plan for just one of our sites (around 15 to 20 routes per week) could take 3 days, or even a full week in cumulative time. We had no global visibility over our operations, and it was very difficult to react quickly to changes: adding new delivery points, deactivating others. We realized we couldn’t support our growth with such manual ways of working. In the short term, we needed to find a partner that would allow us to industrialize our process.
"K: Why did you choose Kardinal?
M.O.: We benchmarked several solutions on the market. What we really wanted was a tool capable of integrating our operational reality, which is completely different from classic last-mile delivery. We’re closer to a transport plan with a fairly consistent structure throughout the week, or even the month. The framework is built to last. So we didn’t just want a route calculator, but something that adapts to our business constraints: driver authorizations per site, time windows, time spent on location.
Kardinal was the tool that best met our need to model concretely and quickly what we needed on the ground. For every specific request, the team gets back to me very quickly.
K: How did the implementation go?
M.O.: The tool, at least on the Excel side, is very easy to understand. You don’t even necessarily need to know Excel, it’s more copy-paste, and the main thing is to fill in the fields correctly. In one to two hours of training, we were up and running. After that, there were regular exchanges to complete our needs along the way (tolls, excluding the ferry in Gironde) and we went live in under a month.
Today, I’m the sole planner for all our sites. I do a first pass with the tool, enter all the constraints, and once I have the solution proposed by Kardinal, I work for a few hours with the delivery team leader who knows the field much better than I do. The platform allows me to stay in control and modify any delivery point, or move it to another route if I wish. What was most important to us was not to replace people, but to support them in reaching a solid result on the ground.
K: What benefits have you observed?
M.O.: The time spent on planning has been divided by six. And honestly, on some sites, the gain is even greater. Today, 100% of our routes coming out of the tool meet our constraints: the 10-hour working limit, the volume of garments handled, and the kilometres driven.
But the most important benefit is also a human one. Our drivers now have much more evenly balanced routes in terms of volume and mileage. Before, I would send someone to drive 600 kilometres while their colleague drove 100, or someone handling over 1,000 garments while their colleague handled 200. Now we’re at 50-50. And that visibility, I simply didn’t have before.
Thanks to Kardinal, I’m able to smooth out the workload throughout the week, not just for drivers, but also for the production staff who handle the laundry. There’s a double benefit: in delivery, but also in production.
K : Quels sont les futurs projets liés à l'utilisation de Kardinal chez Georges ?
M.O.: We’re opening a new production site in Clermont-Ferrand. I gathered the necessary data and in under 20 minutes, the system completed the synchronization and optimization. The idea is really for Kardinal to be our partner in continuing to structure our growth.
Our next topics to work on together: multi-stop routes, tracking our CO2 emissions, and managing overnight stays, because some sites cover very large regions and we may need to run two-day routes with a night at a hotel. Kardinal has truly become a real development partner for Georges.
