Head of Soissons and Nantes electronics sites

When did you begin working with DV GROUP and what is your job?

I started working with DV GROUP 21 years ago as the Soissons electronics site manager. My job can be summarised into three essential roles: managing and organising the workshop, optimising organisation and production and managing human resources. Three years ago, I was given the parallel job of managing the Nantes site, which makes me the only person at DV GROUP to manage two sites!

How did you become a site manager? Why this choice?

I’ve always been interested in electronics, so I knew very precisely what I wanted to do. I have a Bac qualification in electronics, then I did two years of preparatory studies in higher mathematics and special mathematics before attending an engineering college. On leaving college, I got a job as a workshop manager in an industrial company. Given that I had two skill sets in repairing electronic equipment and onsite intervention, Pierre Vandenhove offered me a job as a site manager for the new electronics agency he was going to create. I accepted straight away!

What skills do you need to have to do this job?

In our trade, we’re there to help our clients and solve their problems. We deal with lots of emergencies because our clients suffer breakdowns which impact their production. In parallel with emergencies, we also have to manage scheduled work such as preventive measures. It’s therefore essential to be thorough and to know how to control your stress in order to keep all our clients happy.

Then, to know how to guide them. Sometimes a client asks us to carry out a specific intervention on a product or installation. When we make an onsite visit or receive the product in the workshop, we finally realise that that’s not the best solution. In this case, we need to make the client understand that another solution is necessary.

What are the difficulties of this job?

For me, the difficulty of this job lies rather in management because, to be honest, I’m a technician first and foremost. When you’re a team manager, you deal with various people who don’t think in the same way, so you have to know how to adapt. And finally, as with lots of jobs, there’s never enough time. But these difficulties make the job interesting and that’s what I enjoy!

What major challenge have you encountered during your career? 

The greatest challenge I meet is with recruitment because in electronics, we need two types of roles: workshop technicians and peripatetic technicians. In France, there are no training courses for these jobs, so learning on the job is very important. Fortunately, at DV GROUP we do everything so that the integration of our new recruits goes well! 

What do you like most about your work? With DV GROUP?

What I like most in my job is the diversity of tasks and also the clients. We can be called to work on a yacht, then in a theatre, then travel to Tunisia to troubleshoot a factory that’s at a standstill – it’s incredible! Then, what I love is when everything gets sorted out and we succeed in finishing all the scheduled tasks. It’s very satisfying!

For me, DV GROUP is a company which gives us the means to do our work well. In our jobs, you constantly have to adapt to new equipment and new protocols and the group is committed to that. And finally I find that it’s really lucky that we have a leadership that remains open to our project ideas!

To finish, has any particular experience made an impression on you?

One Sunday evening around 9 o’clock I was called and asked to go to Marseille as quickly as possible to help out a company specialising in lamination which had encountered a big problem on their more than 1 megawatt laminator. When I arrived onsite, there were already around 20 people working on it: it was impressive! No-one could solve the problem and it was then that I had a completely improbable idea! I proposed grafting a small, barely 1 kilowatt drive onto the large drive which I knew I wasn’t going to use for its power, but only for its digital intelligence in order to then be able to apply the function I wanted. I convinced the client, we did it and it worked wonderfully!