Michel Baujard

Thales Aerospace Division

“Sébastien Roche? We’re still talking about him! In 2003, he came to do his graduate project in the aviation division of Thales, one of the six divisions of the corporation, which has 13,000 employees. The aviation division is managed on a customer driven continuous improvement system, and Sébastien’s project consisted of a major effort to reduce the documentation being provided, in particular to Airbus.

The mass of documents was huge, and they had to be analyzed one by one to assess their added value and figure out where the duplications and overlaps were coming from. Sébastien carried out a genuine junior consultant assignment, helping the various actors reach an agreement, and then making proposals. His idea was to change the way of thinking. Instead of depending on the corporate in-house organization, he suggested setting up an adjustable standard documentation based on a technical tree hierarchy. This resulted in eliminating a great many useless or duplicate documents.

In 2006, another student from Nantes, Nicolas Chéreau, interned with us, and he also performed work that was highly beneficial for the division. Again, in the context of our improvement system, he helped organize in-house forums for exchanging best practices in R&D. He was still an intern here when the forums were held. Nearly 5,000 people from all the sites capitalized their experiences in a database. He was able to see the real-life results!

In both cases, the students demonstrated great analytical and organization abilities, all of course in a totally international context. The benefits to the company were undeniable.”