Trigano digitalizes its production team management with Mercateam

About Trigano

• Nationality : France 🇫🇷
• Business sector: Recreational Goods

Trigano is a French group of companies created in 1935 by Edgard Trigano, specialized in the design, manufacture and marketing of vehicles and leisure equipment (motor homes and caravans).

A player in the motorhome market in France and Europethe company also markets camping equipment, trailers, caravans and related services.

The group has more than more than thirty plants in the world.

The challenge of Trigano's digital transformation

The Tournon-sur-Rhône production site was the first in the group to place its trust in Mercateam. It is specialized in the production of motorhomes and caravans. It is a production site of 1000 people built around 4 production lines.

At Trigano VDL, competency management was done on Excel / paper and the competency library was not standardized. The management of personnel on the job was specific to each production unit.

In this context, the management of know-how was a daily challenge, both in terms of production quality, efficiency and safety for operators.

Very few tools were used to support and manage production and to connect support to the field. Large ERP software suites were deployed, including SAP, which was used for human resources management, but only for administrative actions (payroll and absence management). So managers had nothing to manage their teams.

The challenges of this digital transformation

Trigano admits to having at that time a still limited maturity on know-how management and after an identification of an important return on investment, they had the will to work on 5 themes:

1/ Competence and clearance management

2/ Digitization of the training process

3/ Simplification and optimization of job assignment choices

4/ Professional evaluations

5/ Digitization of all content (site instruction and post)

The people involved in this digital transformation and optimization project are :

∙ Site Manager

∙ HR site + group

∙ Group digital manager

∙ All managers in production: site manager, area managers, managers

∙ Site manager for trainings

∙ Operators

These 5 themes were finally linked together.

Below, let's get into the details of the issues.

The tools to manage skills and authorizations were either were either very archaic (home-made Excel tables) or simply non-existent. For example, there was no competency matrix other than in the heads of the managers.

This led to important problems of safety, quality and traceability of the production. Indeed, it was often impossible to ensure that all operators were well trained to work on their production stations, or even to be sure that they mastered the necessary authorizations.

It was also very It was also very difficult to anticipate retirements and the replacement of skills that may disappear with a retired operator.

The training follow-up was very complex which made decision making for training very complicated. The identification of training needs was important and very difficult to anticipate (due to a poor understanding of who can do what).

Due to the sometimes erroneous decisions of who should be trained in what and by whom, the training had to be printed or done by head. The process resulted in wasted time, reduced training quality, friction in the field and reduced willingness to train.

The The planning of the personnel at the production station was on Excel or in the heads of the managers. As a result, these same managers wasted a lot of time identifying to identify the operators capable of working on the different production stations. In particular, when someone was absent, it was always difficult for them to identify the operators able to replace them because of the lack of information on the skills mastered by each of them.

This process was very time-consuming. At each shift change (2 to 3 times a day depending on production volumes) operators had to go to their shift manager to find out where they were stationed. This was a waste of time for the managers and a loss of production.

Many other issues were added: management of temporary workers, people shifts, replacements.

Annual appraisals, competency tracking, annual and professional interviews were done on paper and Excel and were extremely difficult to track for both support and operational functions. The HR departments therefore took advantage of Mercateam 's success to migrate the process to the platform.

Due to the Excel tools used, no data was available for human resources, making it almost impossible to anticipate needs. Thus, to make a GPEC policy for the company and for the employees was almost impossible.

The arrival of Mercateam

The project consisted of a pilot phase (POC - Proof of concept) of a few weeks followed by the deployment to the entire Mercateam site. Several visits and meetings with the teams were conducted to map the existing processes and data.

The deployment was carried out in several stages:

Step 1: Mapping the group's know-how of the group with the teams by capturing data on employees, skills, authorizations, training, positions...

Step 2: Digitize all this data via Mercateam to allow all users to share and update it, as well as to have clear visuals and figures on the know-how map: dynamic versatility matrix, digitalization of training courses... It is now possible to be trained via a tablet in the field or to follow the evolution of your team's skills directly on the shop floor.

Step 3: Standardize and digitize the assignment schedule of production employees. Production schedules were broken down by team with different practices on different Excel files. They took a lot of time to make, were not standardized and did not allow for any alert on human errors that could be made (employee not trained for the position or assigned but absent, duplicate assignment...)

Step 4: Mercateam becomes the reference platform for content management and site instructions. Content" in Mercateam is all the documentation (word processing, video, photos, PDF, etc.) required for production. This includes generic instructions common to the entire site as well as each of the operating procedures specific to each workstation or even the instructions for applying authorizations (e.g. working at height). In Mercateam , these contents are associated with skills, authorizations and positions. When an update is made via the validation flow, employees are immediately notified that they must consult the updated documentation.

Step 5: Digitalization of professional interviews. Since all the skills, training and assignment paths in production are already in Mercateam, it seemed natural to Trigano to use the professional interview functionality to enhance and support its employees. The functionality is available to both field managers and HR departments, who can monitor the progress of annual interview campaigns.

For all deployments of these features, support and documentation (mainly videos) are provided so that users can easily and quickly learn Mercateam.

Results & Benefits

A calculation of the return on investment of the Mercateam solution allowed us toidentify and quantify (in time and money) the annual gains from the improvement of all these processes and was evaluated at nearly 350k € (without taking into account the gains in terms of security and the intangible gains in terms of brand image linked to the quality of the products).

A ROI of less than 3 months, financed by :

• the time saved by managers in identifying operators, organizing training, measuring versatility and updating dozens of Excel files;
• the time it takes to identify employees for assignment to a position (planning);
• quality gains in production: thanks to the planning and the link with skills, we ensure that only well-trained people are assigned to the right job;
• Efficiency and quality gains through the rapid transmission of changes in quality and production instructions.

Verbatims: What Trigano's teams think