{"id":5213,"date":"2026-05-07T12:27:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T17:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/?p=5213"},"modified":"2026-05-07T12:27:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T17:27:28","slug":"balado-towards-personalized-production-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/news\/balado-towards-personalized-production-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Balado: towards personalized production management"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\ud83c\udfa4 Listen to the full podcast segment on Mon Carnet by Bruno Guglielminetti<\/a><\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie Delvoye, Director of Communications at Prompt, invites Julien Audet Gagnon from Unico rev\u00eatement m\u00e9tallique<\/a> to talk about customized production management in the metal coating industry. <\/p>\n\n

Discover the podcast, in full text<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

\u00c9milie: Today I’m talking to Julien Audet-Gagnon, President and CEO of Unico, a Quebec company specializing in metal cladding projects. Hello Julien. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Good morning. Thank you all for taking the time to listen to us. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: It’s a pleasure. So today you’re going to tell us about a project to develop a tool for optimized, personalized production management that you set up with the support of Prompt. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Yes, absolutely.<\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: Do you want to tell us a little bit about what triggered this project?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Yes, indeed. Unico specializes in sheet metal processing for exterior cladding applications, for all types of buildings. We’re very much in the custom-built business. Managing production is relatively complex in the sense that we have a lot of equipment, it’s a lot of last-minute work, and there are a lot of changes during production. Delivery is never fast enough. The reality of construction being what it is, you have to be able to turn around fairly quickly. Production management tools are therefore becoming a major challenge, especially as we grow and can no longer hold all the information in one brain. We had an MRP tool in place which we had developed for our own needs, but which was coming to the end of its tether as the company grew. We had considered various possible solutions for implementing another system, and then we went down a path that was a little out of the ordinary, i.e. we decided to take a basic ERP system and then to build the system completely from scratch, so that it was really adapted, very precisely, to our needs. It’s true that it’s a bit of an unusual route to take, and it can be costly, but it’s a bet we took, and we’re satisfied with the results today. And the challenge of this implementation was that it had to be done in a short timeframe, that there had to be no impact on either our customers or production, and that we had to be able to work with both the old system and the new one in a short space of time. That was the challenge, and that’s what we set ourselves. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: <\/strong>So, what’s the impact of what you’ve set up as part of this project?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: The impact is as much human. We’re always doing things for people, by people. The ultimate goal of all this, apart from the technology, is to be able to deliver quality and shorter delivery times to our customers. Service is always at stake. Since labor is hard to come by, and we know that the workforce will be shrinking over the next few years, we want our employees, as far as possible, to be as comfortable and value-added as possible in the company’s plant operations. These were the two main motivations for this move, and indeed, for the future growth of the company, data that is poorly structured doesn’t help us make the right decisions. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: <\/strong>If we take a step back from this project, you’ve been working on reducing manual tasks. Is that it? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Among other things, but sometimes, as I often say, the devil is in the detail. For a manufacturing company, it’s all about predictability, scheduling, work organization and step reduction. That’s more where we came in. It’s about resources working in real time on the right things: less passing time between production stages, fewer open and unclosed projects. When we start a project, we try to finish it and be able to know where we are in percentage terms, i.e. whether it has taken too long. This helps us with our costing. It helps us in many ways to serve the customer better, and also to ensure that the employee is not under pressure. A year ago, it was still computerized, but everyone decided to work a little on the week’s work. Now, we tell them exactly, by workstation, what they have to do today. They can’t just decide to work on a project that isn’t a priority. This allows us to have better communication with the offices too. And we really have a step forward. Before, even project managers could schedule their production to some extent. Now, it really goes through a planner who validates everything and anticipates problems, because there’s rarely a project that’s the same. It takes expertise, and it takes people who can see further ahead the impact that production can have. This tool gives us a slightly more macro view of operations. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: <\/strong>Are you already able to see productivity gains?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Absolutely, yes. We know that we can take a little more than we were able to. We realize where there were productivity losses. Customers also benefit because there are fewer delays. We used to be able to say ‘yes’ to a customer, but when we’re overloaded with work, first of all we have trouble knowing, and then we say ‘yes’ to a customer without knowing in two weeks’ time what the production pipeline will look like. Now, we’re better at keeping our word. We used to try to stick to our word all the time, but sometimes we had to finish later, we had to overtime when we’d probably lost time on other jobs. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: So we’re talking about productivity gains, we’re talking about more job satisfaction for your employees. And you told me about an important point when we were preparing too. You said it had created commitment, right, in the teams? <\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Being a young team, people are a little more open to implementing technologies, but the fact remains that there are different personalities within an organization. And change management is an issue that is often overlooked. However, by doing it this way, gradually and more gently, there was practically nothing but positive. It could have turned out differently, but in our case, it was positive and people quickly saw the gains. It created a certain mobilization and interest in continuing in this direction. We’ve done a lot of work in the factory, but there’s still the administrative side to do. We’re in the testing phase now, and should deliver the next phases of the ERP system. In the short term, we will no longer be dependent on the old MRP system. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: Excellent. So, what motivates you to innovate? <\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: I’m going to be a bit dramatic here, but it’s almost a matter of life and death in a company like ours, because the workforce is shrinking. Competition is very fierce. The other point is that if you want to grow and want to implement tools, if you don’t have cleansed data and then clean data, after that you can’t move on to the next phase of your development. We have no choice. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: <\/strong><\/strong>We are no longer in choice, we are in necessity.<\/h2>\n\n

Julien Audet-Gagnon: Yes, exactly. As we know, many Quebec companies have a major technological debt in various fields. So we have to invest a lot in this area. Sometimes, it’s not astronomical sums. There are a lot of things we can do with “quick-wins” that enable us to make gains. More and more, it’s going to be democratized, so it’s motivating, but at the same time you have to keep up and\/or be ahead of the parade because otherwise, sooner or later it’s going to catch up with you. I often see my manufacturing company more as a technology company than a manufacturing company. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9milie: <\/strong><\/strong>Thank you very much Julien. If you too would like to create impact for your company with a technological innovation project, I invite you to get in touch with Prompt to assess the options available to support you. <\/h2>\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

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Listen to the full segment here<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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Develop tools to help healthcare professionals make better clinical decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2663,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcast"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5213"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5222,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5213\/revisions\/5222"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/promptinnov.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}