The Missing Links. Caroline Mondon
toward Héloïse with a grave expression. “We’re continuing, slowly but surely, to lose orders from Saint-Nazaire, one after the other. This information is spreading around the shipyards like wildfire. Everybody now knows about the loss of your father, and this has already become a concern for our customers. I could have calmed the waters if we didn’t have this recurrent quality problem with the armchairs. Not just any armchairs, either, but the ones that were intended for the officers’ bar—and just when a new purchaser came on the scene, too! It is well known: a satisfied customer doesn’t say anything to anyone, but a dissatisfied customer will complain to at least ten prospects.”
Hubert pauses for breath. “When you’re hunting and the hounds come across a wounded animal, they will not let it go. Customers do just the opposite, but it ends up the same way—when their supplier goes through a bad patch, that’s exactly when they let the supplier go. At this rate, the revenue in our most profitable product line is going to collapse. The business is going to lose value at the very time we’re trying to sell it.”
He is deathly pale. Héloïse, pale also, offers him a chair. Pierre looks at both of them impassively. A heavy silence descends.
Finally, Pierre clears his throat and speaks up. “You say ‘everybody now knows.’ Whom do you mean by ‘everybody’?”
“The whole network in contact with the subcontractors in western France.” answers Hubert.
“And where do they build these boats that you equip?”
“Mainly in Saint-Nazaire and in the west.”
“The west?” Pierre presses on.
“Yes. You know, the western area of France, which includes Bretagne.”
“And what exactly is keeping you from outfitting boats that are made elsewhere?”
“Hmm ... well, ah, we’ve never really sought out other shipyards. Saint-Nazaire has always been enough for us,” says Hubert candidly.
The conversation trails off again. Pierre gets up, breaking the silence by saying that he would start his work right away by drawing up the organization chart. “It will take me the whole afternoon. I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.”
Hubert watches him go without saying anything. Héloïse doesn’t leave Hubert time to reflect. “Have you talked to Roger about the quality problem we’re having with the order that was to be sent today?”
“No.” Hubert sighs loudly. “What’s the problem this time?”
After leaving the somber office, Pierre starts for the shop floor with gusto. He is keen to see the products that are made by H. Rami and also to identify the “green”—the value-added factors that justify the company’s existence. In the wood shop, he finds Roger contorting himself inside a piece of furniture, probably in the process of fitting one of the parts. Pierre gestures to him to carry on; he will conduct the visit by himself.
From first glance the layout of the factory intrigues Pierre. The furniture being assembled is mostly made out of wood. The metal pieces are secondary parts.
“Why, then,” he wonders, “are the two parts of the overall shop floor, the wood shop and the metal shop, separated by a wall for nearly their entire length? And why is the shipping dock beside the wood shop located so close to the passageway that links the two workshops together? It requires the finished products to retrace their paths through the factory before exiting.”
Pierre strides toward the shipping dock. There, on a clipboard, he begins to draw up a diagram that shows the flow of products backward from the shipping dock through the factory. He uses different colors to indicate first the finished products—the furniture; then the wood; then the metal components—the machined parts that are fitted to the pieces of wood; and, finally, the raw material of which the components are made—the metal itself.
He moves quietly from one workstation to the next, greeting each of the workers with a nod and a smile, and they respond in kind. He watches them with great interest as they work. They can sense this, and some of them make more of an effort than usual, especially those who are working directly with the wood. They plane the surfaces and attach the small metal accessories with an economy of movement that amazes Pierre.
“It looks like the ‘red’ is between the various operations and not within the operations themselves,” he observes. Each time he moves from one workstation to the next, his diagram grows more complete. He makes a note of the small, strange prefabricated shed with its papered windows, at a corner of the storeroom. He notices the storeroom supervisor gives it a wide berth. When Pierre asks him if he might enter it, the storeroom supervisor says that it is up to his boss if a visit to “the coop” is permissible. But when Pierre asks him who the boss actually is, the answer he receives is so vague that Pierre makes a mental note to ask the question again later.
Once the diagram is finally finished, Pierre continues to look around, absorbing the atmosphere in order to notice any possible clues that might lead him to Thierry Ambi. He winds his way between workstations cluttered with wooden planks, partially assembled drawers, and rows of half-built armchairs. He navigates his way around a mountain of small school desks that are stacked one on top of another. He zigzags his way past piles of wooden planks and blocks his ears as he passes the screeching circular saw. He discreetly lifts the sheet of plastic that serves as a door to the painting booth, careful to avoid the half-opened cans of paint sitting on the ground. Pierre’s brow furrows as he watches workers struggle with the stacks of wood and batches of metal.
Like Héloïse, he too nearly loses his footing over the iron bars on the floor of the metal shop. He makes a mental note of the number of people who are moving about the shop or shifting the various materials from place to place. He realizes that, at any given moment, there are more of them than there are machine operators working with the raw materials or assembling the components. It is as though the lenses on his glasses turn alternately red and green, according to what he sees. He glances at his watch. He has been here for less than two hours, but he can already deduce the low percentage of value-added activities. Just like the case studies in the book, there are at least double the number of red activities here as green.
Absorbed in his observations, Pierre very nearly forgets his mission that afternoon: the organization chart. Who is the boss of whom? No point in asking, he saw that with his own eyes. He saw Roger Chaillou rushing around twice as much as any of his co-workers, to the point where he didn’t even have time to catch up with Pierre. He also saw the supervisor answer, on the spot, each of their questions as they came up. “A real go-to guy,” as his brother used to say about one of his apprentice mechanics. And Pierre saw Jean-Marc Gridy, with the attitude of an aggressive pit bull, treating his co-workers like ill-behaved children who were likely to do something wrong at any moment.
He noticed the sideways glances that the “children” in question gave as they slowed down the moment the “pit bull’s” back was turned. He also saw a red-bearded man whose posture froze and who stared coldly as he passed by. Pierre didn’t know who the guy was, but noticed that, as soon as he had passed, the man went to speak with his black-and-yellow-attired co-workers, and that they listened attentively to him. Pierre saw how the man tried to speak to the guys on the other side of the workshop wall, the ones dressed in blue, and how the “pit bull” spotted him at once and, with lower jaw sticking out, headed straight for him. Pierre admired the way the red-bearded man went back to his machine and resumed his work with a calm air at the very moment the pit bull would have pounced on him.
It is late in the afternoon when Pierre leaves the shop floor to return to the offices. He still needs to question Georgette about the hierarchical relationships within the company. Pierre has never had a problem ingratiating himself with anyone. He only has to smile. He does so on