Trigano digitalizes production team management with Mercateam

About Trigano

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

Trigano is a French group of companies founded in 1935 by Edgard Trigano, which has established itself as a leader in the sector of leisure vehicles and equipment such as motorhomes and caravans. A major player in the motorhome market in France and Europe, the company has expanded its offering to include camping equipment, trailers, caravans and associated services such as maintenance and rental.

With an international presence, the group operates over thirty factories around the world. Its expertise in innovation and quality makes Trigano a trusted choice for outdoor enthusiasts.

Trigano's digital transformation challenge to optimize production team management

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, skills management was based on Excel / paper and the skills library was not standardized. Shift management 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/ Skills and authorization management

2/ Digitizing the training process

3/ Simplifying and optimizing job assignment choices

4/ Professional assessments

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

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

∙ Site Manager

∙ HR site + group

∙ Group digital manager

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

∙ Site manager for trainings

∙ Operators

These 5 themes were finally linked together.

Below, we go into more detail about the issues at stake.

The tools for managing skills and mandatory clearances were either very outdated (in-house Excel spreadsheets) or simply non-existent. For example, there was no skills matrix other than what was held in the minds of the managers.

This led to significant issues in terms of safety, quality, and production traceability. It was often impossible to ensure that all operators were properly trained to work on their production stations, and there was no guarantee that they possessed the necessary clearances.

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 SWP 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) lasting a few weeks, followed by deployment across the entire Mercateam site. Several visits and meetings with teams were carried out to map existing processes and data.

Deployment was thus carried out in several stages:

Step 1: Map the Group's know-how by capturing data on employees, skills, authorizations, training, positions, etc.

Step 2: Digitize all this data via Mercateam to enable all users to share and update it, as well as to have clear, quantified visuals on the know-how map: dynamic versatility matrix, digitization of training... 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 production staff assignment schedules. Production schedules were broken down into teams with different practices on different Excel files. They were time-consuming to draw up, were not standardized and did not provide any warning of human errors that might occur (employee not trained for the job or assigned but absent, double assignment, etc.).

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

Step 5: Digitizing job interviews. With all the skills, training and assignment paths in production 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 track the progress of annual interview campaigns.

For all deployments of these functionalities, support and documentation (mainly videos) are provided to help users get to grips with Mercateam quickly and easily.

Results & Benefits

A project to calculate the return on investment of the Mercateam solution has enabled us toidentify and quantify (in terms of time and money) the annual gains from improving all these processes and was evaluated at nearly €350k (excluding safety gains and intangible gains, notably in terms of brand image linked to product quality).

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 thanks to rapid transmission of changes in quality and production instructions.

Verbatims: What Trigano's teams think