Industrial performance consulting firm
Aim for industrial excellence in your factories
Take sector leadership by turning your strategic ambition into measurable industrial performance. Develop your ROI: costs, lead times, quality, safety, environment, thanks to Lean and digital tools, and become a benchmark in competitiveness. Our industrial performance consulting firm supports you from strategy definition through shop-floor deployment, including team training.
Which levers can boost your factories’ industrial performance?
In an industrial environment under strong competitive pressure, controlling operational performance becomes a decisive strategic lever to support growth, secure margins, and build long-term resilience.
Take sector leadership in competitiveness
- Adapt your operating model and processes to the new industrial and economic challenges in your sector.
- Anticipate market changes to secure your industrial performance over the long term.
- Build differentiating competitive advantages, visible in your costs, lead times, and service level.
Build an industrial strategy that truly creates value
- Build an industrial roadmap aligned with the company’s strategy and market ambitions.
- Prioritize industrial investments based on their real impact on performance and profit and loss.
- Focus efforts on levers that generate real, measurable, and lasting impact, including Lean principles and waste elimination.
Create customer value with Lean Manufacturing
- Define customer value precisely.
- Identify and optimize value streams.
- Create continuous flow.
- Pull production based on actual demand.
- Make continuous improvement part of daily operations.
Secure your suppliers for sustainable performance
- Align stakeholders and build reliable, high-performing, and sustainable relationships through a structured supplier delivery approach.
- Increase transparency on capacity, lead times, and priorities.
- Evolve supplier portfolios.
Accelerate shop-floor decisions through digitalization
- Save time by reducing decision lead times through real-time visibility on industrial performance.
- Strengthen your ability to anticipate and correct deviations through more reliable process management.
- Focus digital investments on uses that generate lasting gains in cost, lead time, quality, and safety.
Develop a strong and positive management culture
- EEstablish common management practices in the service of industrial performance. /li>Share a strong management standard to ensure safety and quality on the shop floor.
- Give frontline managers the routines and tools they need to drive team performance every day.
6 tips to optimize industrial performance
Sustainable industrial performance starts with an objective diagnosis of industrial maturity, covering processes, flows, capacities, costs, organizations, management practices, and steering.
This factual reading of maturity levels makes it possible to identify gaps, target the highest-ROI levers, prioritize investments, and align decision-makers around a realistic, measurable transformation path that creates lasting value.
To achieve operational excellence, we have developed a systems approach for our teams in the field. This approach is structured around four main areas: processes, people and organization, material resources and data, and management. By optimizing processes, we ensure that production runs smoothly and efficiently. By enhancing people and organization, we strengthen commitment and skills. Equipment and data are optimized to ensure maximum use of resources. Finally, rigorous management enables us to monitor performance and adjust actions in real time, ensuring continuous and sustainable improvement.
Maturity, regularity and controlled lead times are the keys to exceptional performance. These levers make it possible to turn challenges into opportunities, by requiring a precise description of processes and a rigorous, quantified assessment of their effectiveness. Continuous development to perfect these processes then becomes a driving force for innovation and progress. Each action mobilises all the energies available within the organization, from management to teams in the field, uniting their efforts towards a common goal. By harmonising practices and aligning everyone’s contributions, a dynamic and inspiring environment is created, where each element plays a crucial role in achieving optimum performance. This approach ensures sustainable operational efficiency and forges a stronger competitive edge, which is visible to customers.
Defining value from the customer’s point of view, mapping the value chain, eliminating waste (Muda), creating a continuous flow and establishing a pull system are the foundations of a Lean transformation. Through continuous improvement (Kaizen), every challenge becomes an opportunity for greatness, and every success a step towards excellence. By adopting Lean Manufacturing tools and techniques such as 5S, just-in-time (JIT), kanban, poka-yoke, andon, SMED, and Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Lean transcends methods to embody a true state of mind. It’s not just a series of practices, but a dynamic philosophy where every improvement, however small, forges a path towards real performance. Lean invites everyone in the organisation to see challenges as springboards for innovation, turning every victory into a positive loop.
An Operational Excellence approach requires the mobilization of everyone, from the operator to the CEO and from the CEO to the operator, based on a logic of small, permanent victories. Each victory strengthens commitment and proves that continuous improvement is possible. Support for cultural change and transformation is provided by specific resources tailored to each level of responsibility in the operational chain. This includes tailored training, collaborative workshops and performance monitoring tools. These initiatives help to create an environment where everyone in the organization feels involved and responsible for the collective success. Transparent and regular communication on objectives and progress encourages buy-in and alignment from all players. By incorporating feedback and celebrating successes, we reinforce the culture of excellence and ensure a sustainable and effective transformation, thereby contributing to optimum business performance.
Setting progress in motion all the time
To excel sustainably in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environment, a company must embrace perpetual progress. By cultivating constant agility, it becomes capable of adapting quickly to market changes and new customer expectations. By maximizing resource efficiency, frugality transforms every challenge into an opportunity for innovation and growth. Continually measuring ourselves against the benchmarks of excellence in the market helps us to maintain high standards and inspire a relentless quest for perfection. This approach infuses a culture of continuous improvement in which every employee feels part of a shared journey towards excellence. In this way, the company forges a resilient and dynamic identity, ready to overcome obstacles and boldly seize opportunities. By setting progress in motion all the time, it positions itself not just to survive, but to thrive and inspire, guaranteeing sustainable performance and dazzling competitiveness over the long term.
Our solutions to accelerate your industrial performance
Our know-how in Lean, industrial design, operational excellence, cost reduction, as well as training and corporate culture, allows us to ensure the effective delivery of the expected gains;
Define your industrial strategy
- Industrial and financial audits
- Definition of global and multi-site roadmaps
- Process optimization (digital twins)
- Process optimization (conversion costs)
- Diagnosis and benchmarking of SQCDME performance
- Development of managerial maturity
- Supplier performance development
- Industry 4.0 project management
Deploy your operational excellence model
- Acculturation and conviction building
- Training, green belt and black belt certifications
- Process optimization and development of added value for customers
- Lean progress projects: VSM, 5S, Kaizen, Hoshin, JIT, SMED, TPM, Heijunka, Hoshin Kanri, Gemba
- Systemic approach, from acculturation to organizational alignment and the generation of added value and innovation for customers.
Boost industrial competitiveness
- Establishment of managerial standards
- Deployment of digital visual management
- Skills training for teams, 1st level managerial training, coaching for field managers
- Industry 4.0 project management
Turn data into action with Industry 4.0 steering.
- Definition of the cost model
- Review of production standards and implementation of maintenance routines over time
- Identification of managerial levers for maintaining economic indicators
- Costing and prioritization of improvement activities
Improve performance
Achieve a lasting step change in operational performance
Improved customer service level
Increased capacity
Reduced lead times
Improved quality and OEE
Reduced material losses
Improved OEE and productivity
Team resilience and flexibility
Ability to adapt quickly to market changes
Greater stability in operating modes
Improved attractiveness and lower turnover
Reduced absenteeism
Visible financial gains in the income statement
Reduction of variable costs by 3% to 8%
Reduction of indirect production costs by up to 10%
Reduction of direct labor rates through lower absenteeism
Contact our industrial performance consultants
Do you want to accelerate and secure industrial ramp-ups?
Are you looking to reduce end-to-end lead times?
Do you need to secure supply chains in an unstable environment?
Partner
After 10 years’ operational experience as Production Manager and then Programme Manager in the aerospace industry on international programmes, Mathieu joined the consultancy business in 2006. A specialist in operational performance and cost control, he helps companies to implement solutions that have a visible impact on the income statement. His areas of expertise include company turnarounds, operational performance including support functions, steering processes and management control.
Rely on our experience in industrial strategy and performance
Project management assistance for a new fully automated plant Developing the autonomy of production teams
Deployment of new Lean development methods for strategic investments
Industrial master plan for growth and site doubling.
Implementation of multi-site progress plans to reduce lead times and improve quality
Dematerialization of the quality release file and support for the changeover to the new ERP system
Setting up industrial performance management and developing the skills of first-level managers
SEW Usocome
Project management assistance for Industry 4.0
Our intervention
Definition of functional requirements: design of target flows and implementations, framing of expected use cases for the new goods-to-man warehouse (shuttles, AGVs), and automated line-side replenishment.
PMO support assistance: support to the project owner in building the investment plan, contributions to the technical specifications, and validation of expected performance levels.
Implementation of synchronized automated logistics-to-production flows: synchronization between the new automated warehouse (shuttle + AGV), incoming ERP/MES flows, and the planning of “mini-factory” assembly lines operating in just-in-time flow.
Team engagement & change management: facilitation of participative workshops with mini-factory managers, operators, and methods/HSE teams to ensure strong adoption of the “performance & workplace atmosphere” model.
The results
Development of customer service quality
- Improved stockability and availability: logistics capacity tripled through an automated warehouse with AGVs/shuttles, reaching up to 4,000–6,000 items dispatched per day
- Reduced assembly lead times: thanks to just-in-time flows and ERP/MES integration, receiving, assembly, and shipping lead times were reduced to 3 days
Downstream supply chain performance
- Logistics consolidation: centralized storage in Brumath, with standardized transfer of volumes from Haguenau and Forbach, reduction of unit transport costs, and cost optimization through warehouse automation
- Reduced movements: induction-guided AGVs, elimination of manual internal movements, reduction of inventory levels and logistics-related energy consumption
- Reduced production workload: automation of labor-intensive tasks (picking, handling) through AGVs/shuttles enabled operators to be reassigned to higher value-added activities, while also improving workplace ergonomics
« The joint work between Thai Union sales and industrial management control teams and Citwell has enabled us to structure the management of our costs and the monitoring of our budgets. The tools that have been put in place enable the teams to consolidate data quickly and to devote more time to value-added activities such as identifying levers for improving the cost volume mix. »
Guillaume Kervennal, Thai Union Group Business Unit Director at Meralliance
«We chose Citwell to support us in our operational excellence project. The Citwell team is guiding us through an approach that doesn't aim to make us perfect, but to make us better than we were yesterday. And as a perfectionist, this has enabled me to evolve, limit the obstacles and move forward more quickly. »
Cécile Gaillard, Operationnal Excellence Manager at Beneo
« Citwell's manufacturing team perfectly understood and mastered the mission, which was not limited ‘simply’ to reducing our investment costs on a project. Our ambition was to change our organizational model; Citwell helped us achieving this objective by generating real gains in performance and efficiency. »
Antoine Doutriaux , Plastivoire managing director
« Citwell really does recommend the technology you want, not just a few technological bricks wrapped up in a big dose of lean. »
Martial Debray , OPEX Manufacrtig OPM & France B.Braun Medical Director