Graziella Lamoussière
Graziella. Photo credit: Christina Mackenzie
Graziella smiles: she was "not at all planning to work either for the defence sector or in industry.” Yet today she is the quality director and member of the management board at the Arquus plant in Garchizy, on the banks of the Loire in the centre of France, where she has been working on armoured vehicles for the past 15 years.
The Garchizy site, one of four owned by Arquus (the France-based defence arm of Sweden’s Volvo Trucks) produces armoured cabins, renovates the VAB (Véhicules de l’Avant Blindé) armoured vehicle and, just recently became the central distributor of spare parts for the entire range of Arquus vehicles including the Jaguar and the Griffon, two of the new armoured vehicles that Arquus and its partners Nexter and Thales are supplying to the French and Belgian armies.
“It’s the quality director who ensures that procedures are in place so that the product leaving the factory doesn’t need to be controlled again and again. We aim to prevent, rather than correct. In fact, for each step, all the risks, whether human or process-related, must be anticipated and procedures put in place to mitigate them. But it’s very hard to anticipate what we call the ‘human factor’,” she says. So, for example, “we identified all the bolts that have a safety impact, for example on the steering column, and we put two people there. The first tightens the bolts and the second checks.”
“ “I never felt that being a woman in this environment was a handicap””
It’s a world far removed from the educational one that Graziella thought she would join as a teacher when she began studying biology. Having failed the exams she “wanted to continue doing biological engineering but the University of Dijon in Auxerre suggested instead I do a BTEC National Higher Diploma in product engineering, a proposal I accepted, hoping to specialise in the biological or pharmaceutical spheres. And I actually really liked it.”
As part of her studies, she had to undertake a number of internships. “I found some in my home town of Nevers, which also relieved my parents of paying my housing costs. And as Nevers is a centre for the mechanical industry and metallurgy so I did my internships there and even if it wasn’t a sector I’d really considered, I immediately loved it.” She likes the concrete side of industry that produces “objects that we can see and touch!”
For her it was a real discovery and she finds it a pity that “industry is not often suggested by schools as a career path."
She realised very quickly that being a woman is a strength, contrary to popular belief, even in an environment that remains very masculine. "My male colleagues helped me right away and I never felt that being a woman in this environment was a handicap,” she says.
Her first job at Valeo (an auto parts manufacturer) was as a quality technician. “That’s where I began to understand everything I had learned at university!” she laughs. Never unemployed but continuously employed on temporary fixed-term contracts, Graziella “never aimed for a permanent contract,” which seemed to her to be unattainable.
And then in 2007, the “adventure” began when she accepted yet another fixed-term contract as a temporary technician at Renault Trucks Defense, now Arquus. “We were only 30 people here when I arrived,” she says. Today there are between 350 and 450. A year later she was offered a permanent position as Quality Director. “To start off with I was the only one in charge of quality. I was just thrown in the deep end!! Today there are 30 of us in my team and we are committed on a daily basis to providing the level of quality expected by our customers in the field.”
Meanwhile, she got a Masters in quality management, which she studied for because she found that her formal education "no longer corresponded to my professional experience." This “completely personal” endeavour took her a year and a half, studying in the evenings and at weekends.
Then, with what she describes as “perfect” timing, she became pregnant after a long 10-year wait. Obliged to stay at home for the duration of her pregnancy, she says that even if she remained “connected” with her team it was difficult for her to disengage from the development of the Garchizy plant for a year.
She has held the same position for almost 15 years. “But there are such changes here in Garchizy that every four or five years I have the impression of changing factories,” she confides.
Today Graziella sees herself more as a guide. “I'm here to help the members of my team, my goal is to make them grow.”
A long-time member of the management board, she helps set the plant's objectives for the next four years and establish priorities.
This young woman, who, single, had renovated a house on her own and who continues to undertake DIY ("helped" by her little boy!) while her husband, a supermarket manager, works at the weekends, is very proud when she sees on TV the military vehicles that come out of the Garchizy plant. Her family too. “My family has always been very proud of the work I do,” she says.
