Engineering & Works

GTIE Rennes (BU in France) is moving into Smart Building, with all the new challenges and new opportunities it offers. Julien Ferron, head of the business since 2016, tells us more about this new direction that marks a turning point for his company.

What path has your career taken to this point?

My career path is slightly unusual. I started at VINCI Energies in 2010 as Human Resources Manager with Cegelec Portes de Bretagne, a post I held for six years. Having always been passionate about field work, I wanted to find a more operational role leading a business.
The sale of the Cegelec Rennes Tertiaire business in 2016 was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. The fusion of the Cegelec and GTIE Rennes teams required human support, and who better than an HR manager to handle that task. My former director, Xavier Loiselet, entrusted the reins of the company to me in January 2016.

What business activities is GTIE Rennes involved in?

GTIE Rennes activity is 70% high voltage and 30% low voltage, with four business managers and a sales manager, distributed as follows:

• 70% commercial buildings;
• 15% industrial units;
• 15% projects in HV / MV applications.

In 2019, GTIE Rennes had 42 employees and revenues of €5.6 million.

In low-voltage applications, we have real expertise in security (access control, intrusion detection and video protection). I decided to capitalise on this, which was not yet the company’s primary activity but showed promise, to offer new projects to our customers.

Why gamble on Smart Building?

Smart Building is going from strength to strength – it’s the future!  And we need to make the switch at the right time. Although this subject has yet to “mature” in the regions, our objective is to generate interest from project owners so they integrate Smart Building packages into their projects.

It’s also a way to diversify our activity in a highly competitive market that has a tendency to drive down prices.

To that end, we’ve spent a year working on Smart Building technologies, with the help of a newly recruited specialist in managing building data, supported by a student apprentice.

What progress have you made and what are the next steps?

The objective is to make GTIE Rennes a Smart Building expert. For this, we will be using our own building as a showcase for our expertise, enhancing it with a BOS (Building Operating System).

The idea is to demonstrate the relevance of this type of innovation to our customers and to architects in Rennes, through real-world applications: structuring and processing data in real time to create service applications. The range of possibilities is vast.

I hope to complete this “showcase” in the next six months. We now need to upgrade all our technical equipment, particularly in access control, intrusion detection and video protection, ready to tackle the integration phase.

The whole team is ready to develop their skills to take this project as far as possible!