Caserne Industries · 4 bottlenecks surfaced in 48 h

Context

Caserne Industries runs 3 manufacturing sites — Rouen, Mulhouse, and Bordeaux — with 80 to 120 people per site and combined revenue of €28M. At the time of the engagement, Operations Director Rémi B. had been tracking a pattern he could not fully account for: projects delivered on time at one site and delayed at another for unclear reasons, handoffs that missed their windows regularly, and coordination meetings consuming 6 to 8 hours per week per site manager without resolving the underlying friction. His working hypothesis was a resource problem: not enough operators on the highest-criticality lines. He was within a week of launching a recruitment plan for 12 additional operators when a board contact suggested a prior diagnostic. The brief to Waimia was direct: before adding headcount, map what is actually happening between these three sites.

Audit

The audit ran over 2 days on-site, structured in three layers. First: structured interviews with the 3 site managers and 6 line supervisors — what breaks, when, between whom, and what information is missing when it does. Second: a systematic review of shift handoff logs, internal messaging records, and coordination meeting minutes from the previous quarter. Third: a physical walkthrough of inter-site communication touchpoints — shift reports as actually produced, escalation paths as actually used, tools in effective practice versus stated procedure. Four structural bottlenecks emerged — none of them a resource deficit. First: shift-end handoff reports were written in inconsistent formats across the three sites, meaning the incoming shift at a receiving site could not act on them without a follow-up call. Second: the escalation path for cross-site production anomalies ran through five steps requiring approval from two managers before reaching the person who could actually resolve the issue — adding a 3 to 4-hour lag each time. Third: production planning updates were sent by email at irregular intervals, creating a 4 to 6-hour lag between a change at one site and its integration into adjacent site schedules. Fourth: the 90-minute weekly coordination meeting included all three sites simultaneously, but 70% of its content was relevant to only one of the three — the other two were effectively held hostage.

What we delivered

• **Audit report** · 4 bottlenecks documented with root cause analysis, severity rating, estimated weekly hours lost per site, and recommended corrective action — delivered as a working document with named owners, not as a slide deck
• **Action plan within 24 hours** · 12 specific actions, each with an owner, a target date, and an effort-to-impact score — no waiting for a steering committee validation cycle
• **Standardized shift handoff template** · single format co-designed with site managers on day 2 of the audit, rolled out before the next shift cycle, validated by all three site managers in the same session
• **Escalation path redesign** · from 5 steps and 2 approval layers to 2 steps and a designated cross-site production anomaly owner, with a 30-minute resolution SLA

Results

Measured over the 6 weeks following action plan implementation. Inter-site coordination delays fell by an estimated 35%, assessed via shift handoff completion rates and cross-site escalation resolution times. The 90-minute weekly coordination meeting was restructured into three 20-minute site-specific calls and one 30-minute cross-site summary. Net time saving: 3 hours per week per site manager — 9 hours per week across the three sites. The recruitment plan for 12 additional operators was put on hold. Three months post-audit, output throughput on the Rouen–Mulhouse corridor — the highest-friction pair — had recovered to its quarterly target without adding headcount. The root cause was never a people problem. It was an information circulation problem that looked like a people problem from the outside.

Trajectory

Caserne Industries is evaluating a structured information layer to automate daily production planning synchronization between the three sites — replacing the current email-based process with a shared dashboard updated in real time from each site's ERP. Waimia is scoping a lightweight integration between the three planning systems and a Claude-powered morning digest that surfaces cross-site conflicts and exceptions before the first shift. The target: near-zero manual coordination time for routine synchronization, with human attention reserved for genuine anomalies. The prerequisite is an ERP data export standardization project the infrastructure team is running in parallel — estimated completion Q2 2026.