CASE STUDY – This French firm transformed its engineering approach through continuous learning, radical redesign, and user-driven innovation, evolving into a lean, resilient company with a strong culture of development.

Words: Eivind Reke, Julie Chevalier, Nadji Merhibi and Julien Marjac

Based just outside the historic city of Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast of France, Proditec is your typical European SME. Owner Christophe Riboulet took over from his father in the late 1990s, inheriting a company that had found a market in the automatic visual inspection of coins. Machines were built and shipped all around the world and, with the introduction of the Euro in 2002, business was booming. In fact, Proditec – which had manufactured its own machines when volumes were relatively low – soon had to find a manufacturing partner that could fulfil all these orders, while they focused on sales and the engineering of new projects. After a while, however, quality issues in the basic design began to appear. These had been solved on the shopfloor, but the knowledge was never captured and, with manufacturing a couple of kilometers down the road, the possibility of quick fixes had all but disappeared.

At the same time, the market for coin inspection machines started to shrink, and the team at Proditec was on the lookout for new business opportunities. An obvious market to tackle was pharma: tablets are similar to coins, in both size and in volume. The need for good quality visual inspection of all sides of the product is also the same. However, as Proditec would soon discover, there were some key differences in customer needs.

THE FIRST COACH VISIT

Proditec’s first forays into pharma were relatively successful, but there was a growing concern that the old machine design was simply not up to scratch anymore. Unfortunately, this was combined with a “don’t touch anything” mentality in engineering that came from multiple experiences with design changes gone astray. At the same time, around 2011, a young French executive coach specialized in lean was giving a speech at a local conference. He had insisted on visiting a gemba while he was in the area and Christophe agreed to take him to Proditec. Little did he know that it would be the start of a decade-long relationship.

What Christophe and the coach found out during their gemba walk was surprising. Back then, it was assumed that Lean was, more than anything, an operational framework focused on the flow of operational processes. What awaited them, instead, were some tough questions about quality, and especially about the design of the product and the adoption to each individual project. In fact, the coach found it very funny that the machines needed to be as big as they were to inspect something as small as a coin or a tablet. In Christophe, the coach found a startled, yet serious and attentive listener. He admitted that he didn’t know how to solve any of the problems that they discovered during the visit but said that he knew where they could start: by studying more deeply their design and that of their competitors. Around the same time, following a disagreement with their manufacturing partner, Proditec also decided to bring assembly back to their own premises. The combination of these two factors was the starting point of an organizational learning journey that would give the company a much deeper insight into both customer needs and engineering possibilities.

Christophe later realized that the challenges with quality they were experiencing at the time had very deep roots and that the problem went beyond just poor drawings made in-house or poor craftmanship at the manufacturing supplier. They stemmed from the technological choices that had been made over the years. Proditec didn’t truly understand what it was about the product that was part of the company’s heritage, and the reason customers came back and what they loved about the machines. Moreover, they didn’t realize that their legacy, unstable, out-of-date technology not only hindered progress, but also put the company at a performance disadvantage against their competitors. Proditec engineers could no longer touch the machine, afraid it might fall apart due to instability, and the root causes of that were technical.

THE FIRST CHANGE

Proditec engineers started by opening the black box, examining and reverse engineering key components and technologies they were already using. After exploring the current design, they started to get a clearer picture of which technologies were part of their heritage and what should be considered legacy. It turned out that most of the technology fell into the latter category. They had optimized past design choices to a point where if they touched one piece, another one fell apart. It quickly became clear that the only way out of this cul-de-sac was to start anew, so Christophe took two of his brightest engineers, put them in a room and locked the door. Well, not literally. He gave them a space to work in and a clear brief:

“Go back to the sandbox, don’t touch the existing set-up and, please, make me a smaller machine”

Their mission was to go back to square one and to not re-use anything. Christophe had no idea where this was heading or how it would end, so he came up with the idea of giving the engineers specified learning tasks. For example, “What is the difference between our camera and the iPhone camera?” This challenge led the team to disassemble the original camera, realizing that the screws were unreliable. The engineers were given a space where projects no longer hindered tactical and strategic reflections. Since everything was free, it allowed the engineers to explore innovative solutions. To instill a sense of urgency, they were tasked with learning at takt-time: every month they would report to the executive team not on what they had done, not on their progress, but on what they had discovered and learned. This remarkable shift gave the engineers great freedom and accelerated their journey, because the focus was on discovery, rather than delivery.

A NEW DESIGN IS BORN

Over time, a complete redesign of the product emerged from the learning and discoveries of the two engineers (and two of us authors) - Julien and Najib.

Julien was eager to share the expertise he had gained with the Proditec Research and Development team. When he took on the leadership of the team, he played a pivotal role in fostering knowledge transfer and empowering the company’s engineers to grow.

This learning delivery model began to influence the wider engineering organization, making work more engaging and meaningful. By incorporating dedicated time for reflection and structured learning spaces, team members could clearly see their progress and take pride in their own development.

The new design was smaller and featured more robust technical solutions. Combined with in-house manufacturing, this started to have a real impact on quality, productivity, cost and on Proditec’s competitiveness. In fact, by focusing on learning and challenging the engineering organization to acquire deeper knowledge around the three main functions of the product (Vision, Software and Human Interface), the new design was radically changed in just a few years. It had brand new laser 3D imaging technology, a simplified detection algorithm running on open-source processing boards, and a smart, simple and user-friendly design of the human interface.

Julien didn’t stop there. He continued to champion this culture of innovation and shared understanding of customer needs by extending his knowledge-sharing efforts beyond R&D – first to the production team and, eventually, to every other department in the company. His commitment to cross-functional collaboration and continuous improvement ultimately led him to take on the role of CEO.

Now that things were looking up again for Proditec, Christophe could focus on the next mission: identifying and supporting the next generation of engineering talent in the organization.

A NEW PRODUCT IS BORN

Najib had been part of the young team of engineers who took on Christophe’s learning challenge. However, after ten years in R&D and three years as a product owner, he was starting to crave new challenges. When Christophe picked up on this, he suggested that Najib helped him realize an idea he had been mulling over. The deal was simple: Najib would move out of the Proditec office into a modern and rather cool co-working space (the office space was shared with a wine merchant!) and be given complete autonomy and authority to realize the idea into a new product. It was a good deal for both parties, and Najib accepted Christophe’s offer in February 2023. A new learning journey had begun, this time not only to develop a new design but to develop a completely new product for a new customer segment. The mission was to launch it in two years – Proditec’s own Lexus-style challenge – under the new brand, named Codji.

Once in his new office, Najib applied the lessons he had learned at Proditec and immediately established an engineering Obeya. Even if he was mostly working on his own, the Obeya helped him to understand the knowledge gaps in terms of customers and competitors, and to clarify engineering targets and technical learning curves that would get him to a viable product. The room was also used to facilitate problem solving and collaboration with other engineers, while giving Najib and Christophe a space to discuss the bigger picture problems they were facing.

The first challenge was to fully understand user needs, what would truly create value for them. The biggest risk for a new product was always a lack of buy-in with feedback like: “confusing”, “not useful”, “I don’t trust it”. There was an assumption about industry needs, but the best way to test and validate this hypothesis was to put the product in front of users. Therefore, Najib created a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with the purpose of collecting feedback from potential customers at various trade shows. To make the MVP, Najib faced a second challenge: to precisely define the product’s functions and select the appropriate technological building blocks. Here it was important to not go into full delivery mode and avoid adding as many features as possible, to try and impress the customer with the technologies mastered by the Proditec and Cojib engineers. Instead, never-before-tested technologies were explored for each function (support, vision, detection, interface), and the focus was on the development of a single target user case, building the main functionality and supporting capabilities.

The first prototype was ready in time for the first trade show: a co-bot with mobile-type cameras, driven by deep learning algorithms embedded on an open-source processing board, and equipped with a web interface accessible from any computer, tablet, or smartphone. All built on technologies previously unexplored in the Proditec inspection machines.

The feedback from the trade show was both exciting and confusing. Users found the product demo ingenious, efficient, and truly useful in every-day life, but struggled to imagine themselves as customers. Since it was presented on a table, it was difficult to imagine the system on a production line, and the co-bot aspect raised concerns: integration costs, requirements for securing operator stations, etc. soon came to be seen as obstacles to adoption.

Very quickly, Najib made a pivot in the product strategy. A second PMV was presented at a second trade show in late 2023: it was based on a fixed support rather than a co-bot and, in partnership with a production line integrator, exhibited the product directly on its demonstration line. This repositioning resulted in the first sale of the system, which was installed in the second half of 2024.

The product Obeya, implemented from the project's launch, remains the primary management framework for Najib and Codji. It allows them to continuously monitor customer feedback and new needs, identify the technological limitations of each component, and quickly launch targeted problem solving. Each iteration is seen as an opportunity to enrich engineering know-how and further improve the value provided to users.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Christophe, Najib and the rest of the Proditec team have been on a lean journey of discovery and learning for almost 15 years now, but the spark for kaizen is still alive and kicking at the company. However, it’s a continuous struggle to avoid backsliding and pushbacks. To support the organizational learning culture built over many years, Proditec is now creating their own technology museum, inspired by the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Technology in Nagoya, telling stories of learning and development to new employees and reminding old-time employees of the journey to date.

So, what can we learn from Proditec?

• That creating spaces for discovery is key to ensuring progress. However, these spaces need both protection and encouragement. Left undefended, the resources will soon be swept up in delivery projects that, left to their own devices, will deprive learning of its direction.
• That, to continue growing, one needs to invest in their talent, pay attention to boredom and give people new challenges. Having a plan for every person is just as important as having a plan for every part.
• That everyone will experience backsliding and push-back at some point, but that what they choose to do about it is up to them.
• That the moment you stop learning and developing, you don’t just stay still but you go backwards.

_THE AUTHORS