The effect of COVID-19 on mobility and transport will be sustainable. And if teleworking has transformed the daily lives of many people across Quebec, it will also have had a major impact on the Montreal carpooling service Netlift, which is abandoning its main purpose and which will focus in the future on paratransit. to the medical sector.
“We had to take a step back,” admits Marc-Antoine Ducas, founder and president of Netlift. “Unlike the delivery tool we deployed last year, the medical transport segment seemed more promising. The Montreal entrepreneur indicates that Netlift will henceforth be a mobility platform for companies.
“In an economy characterized by a growing gap between transport demand and available supply, optimization becomes critical,” says Ducas. “Our assessments lead us to believe that this platform adapted to the business-to-business sector is unique and that we will be able to exploit our technological and operational lead. “
This shift is not a last resort. The company says it has seen business growth of 466% in one year. She has vacancies and, like many others, suffers from a labor shortage.
Specialized since 2012 in logistics related to carpooling in general and applied to the round trip of workers in particular, Netlift has tried in recent months to diversify by expanding its collaborative transport offer to the planning of product deliveries for tradespeople. The Montreal SME also had partnerships with certain health establishments for the transport of patients, staff and certain products, if necessary.
Teleworking caused a sharp drop in demand for ridesharing, then the emergence of e-commerce due to lockdown led to the emergence of many local, regional and international delivery services. The result for Netlift is that its main growth driver has been in services tailored to the medical sector, where there is very little competition. Netlift will also continue to offer its carpooling planning service to companies wishing to help their employees get to the office either faster or more efficiently.
A sector to optimize
One of the factors motivating the adoption by companies of tools to optimize the transportation of their employees is the desire to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their activities. It is above all the large companies which, in Quebec, have specific GHG reduction objectives. At the very least, this will be the market targeted by Netlift on the business-to-business side.
In the medical sector, the offer must be adapted to needs, which are not the same from one establishment to another. Most trips are made by taxi, paratransit or bus companies that do not have a tool for managing and optimizing trips that would allow them to reduce both their costs and their polluting emissions.
This is where Netlift now intends to interfere. Already before COVID, Netlift had a contract for transporting people by taxi with the McGill University Health Center. Then the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’Île-de-Montréal called on Netlift to manage the transport of patients going to undergo a screening test or be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“We learned at that time that we had something in our hands. It is literally a small turnkey transport company that has been deployed, ”explains Marc-Antoine Ducas. Its next challenge for the coming months will be to extend this service offering to the entire medical sector.
In an economy characterized by a growing gap between transport demand and available supply, optimization becomes critical