When Renault Reinvents Its Supply Chain
This article is the translation of its French version published in Forbes: https://www.forbes.fr/management/quand-renault-reinvente-sa-supply-chain/
Large corporations like Renault feel the urgent need to transform their collective practices, which are often seen as rigid and disengaging for employees and, more broadly, for all their stakeholders. Sébastien Samuel, who is in charge of controlling vehicle production within Renault’s supply chain, sheds light on this trend.
Sébastien Samuel leads the team that provides the interface between sales and production, so the company can produce the vehicles that the manufacturer will need to ensure its sales in the coming months. This “factory programming”, implemented last June, is the result of new governance principles.
After 22 years with the Renault group, including research, prototypes, engineering strategy and management of an engineering centre in Brazil, Sébastien Samuel joined the manufacturer’s supply chain in 2016. As a manager who delegates a lot, he has never really adhered to the vertical hierarchy. Even though he once had to set in place highly cut out, heavily mechanized and Taylorized processes, he has since resigned to that.
Back in France, with a hierarchical superior who was very open to management issues, he began to reorganize the department, building on the experience he had already acquired in Brazil.
What is efficient elsewhere may not be appropriate here
In Brazil, confronted with employees who no longer had a clear understanding of what they were doing, he used tools to re-appropriate the objectives and vision of one’s own future. Inspired by an American method, the principle was to ask everyone, every week, for a personal contribution to participate in improving the work and achieving the objectives set. A kind of routine that provided continuous progress, was very well perceived and proved to be very effective.
A mystery of socio-cultural contexts, the principle did not attract enough support in France when it was first introduced, with some employees seeing it as a kind of policing.
Focusing on adherence first
The distinctive feature of Renault’s supply chain was that it had a lot of managers. Department heads, team leaders, managers in teams of just a few people… “A fairly low ratio of rowers to drivers” which does not encourage delegation. Sébastien Samuel’s mission was to transform the programming cycle to make it more agile, more transparent and more collaborative.
Collaboration was the genesis of this transformation since, rather than proposing a plan, he asked his collaborators to make proposals for participative organisations, which would give more responsibility to the teams and bring pleasure to their work. The proposal was therefore developed at the same time as the adhesion, based on surveys that had been carried out on the social climate within the company and specific interviews carried out by the “tribe” in charge of making the proposals.
An adapted holacratic base
The implementation of this new governance involves 50 people in France and 40 in Romania, where Renault has set up a shared service center. The circles are indeed transnational. A legal chart has been set up, the roles and responsibilities have been determined, and although the system includes a number of “holacratic rituals” such as tactical meetings, it stands out in certain aspects: no signing of the constitution and no first ties in the circles, only second ones. Sébastien Samuel is convinced that in his department, the first tie will run the risk of falling back into the hierarchical trap, encouraging the employee to wait for someone else to make the decision for him.
The scheme was designed over a six-month phase (from September 2018 to February 2019). A proposal was submitted in March to S. Samuel and then to the management and staff delegation bodies. It was followed by the organisation of a two-day training “bootcamp”. In the end, the system was implemented after nine months, last June.
Redefining the manager’s role, sometimes with concerns
In the search for team autonomy, the managerial role has been largely redefined. Direct reporting to the line manager has disappeared to make way for coach-managers who accompany and are chosen by the employees.
From 11 managers, the organisation has moved on to 6 coach-managers who each manage around ten people. Most of the coaches are delighted with this new role, this new “development” relationship with the employees, enriching and rewarding since it contributes to the development and the construction of each person’s future. The other former managers have taken on cross-functional Sponsor positions whose responsibility is no longer to decide but to facilitate the success of autonomous teams.
However, Sébastien is, for example, confronted with a former manager, now a coach, who does not know how to approach this new relationship, wondering if it still has its usefulness, if it still brings added value. Until then, he had a management style based on expertise and knowledge. His reaction is, after all, quite logical. Moreover, it is not only on the side of the coach-managers that the adaptation can be difficult. The absence of hierarchy is likely to generate disruptions at all levels, even more so in Romania where the culture of hierarchy is stronger than in France. The question may arise as to the ability of teams to take control of their autonomy, to tell themselves “I’m going to be proactive and do things that my boss hasn’t asked me to do”.
An evolutionary principle
The particularity of the supply chain is that there is no development activity, no products to imagine, but rather a situation to optimize. The department manages the programming of the factories in a fairly repetitive way, while the schedules and principles of agility are applied on the empowerment of decision making, particularly in the management of emergencies: production, transport, supplies…
Although the organization was inspired by what was being done elsewhere (at OCTO for example, with whom Sébastien Samuel worked), its activity did not allow it to rely on any existing examples. The ground zero of this new organization was therefore set not far from the original situation in terms of roles. An evolutionary principle will be applied, with governance meetings that will change roles, responsibilities and circles if necessary.
While the objectives for this first year have been determined by a manager, it is already planned for 2020 to proceed in a collaborative manner for the construction of individual objectives, which will be more oriented towards personal development than quantitative objectives. Similarly, the evaluation of each individual will be done by peers, in “360 mode”.
A possible extension?
In contact with virtually all Renault group functions, the difficulty lies in making people outside the department, “the rest of the world”, understand that it is a circle of people who now have the authority to make decisions. One of Sébastien’s central tasks is precisely to ensure that this authority is respected, to make this change function in an environment that is not necessarily ready to accept it.
Extending this organization to the entire Renault group requires a homogeneity of mindset among very different players, which is difficult to achieve on a large scale. This requires a corporate culture that is at once very strong, shared and open to change. Sébastien Samuel’s vision of generalization is more one of an organization that thrives, that “contaminates”, step by step, so that the benefits are visible and for attitudes to change.
Some kind of a positive virus.
This interview, conducted by Luc Bretones, organizer of the event “The This interview has been conducted by Luc Bretones, organizer of the event “The NextGen Enterprise Summit” with Holaspirit, Maif, Manpower and OCTO Technology, and President of the G9+ Institute.
