Chief Operations Officer (COO)

The COO plays a vital role in your company’s success. Optimizing costs, ensuring ongoing innovations, encouraging flexibility and improving quality as well as customer service are all key to a company’s performance, and involve everything from logistics to plant management, supply chain, purchasing and quality control.

More and more companies are leveraging the expertise of interim COOs. Our interim professionals have considerable experience with major manufacturers and can easily adapt to all types of businesses and environments, including those undergoing major transformations.

Chief Operations Officer background and skills

As an Industrial Director, Operations Director or Site Director, you’ve been responsible for shaping and steering your business’s operational strategy. This includes effectively managing departments under your purview, such as production, engineering, QHSE, procurement, maintenance, etc.

You have experience of managing major transformation projects: production or technology transfers, industrialization efforts, greenfield, footprint reorganization, investments, process modernization, digitalization, etc.

Ideally, you have managed single-site and multi-site international units and led multicultural teams.

Strengths of an executive interim COO

Multi-sector experience acquired within industrial groups in the automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical, agri-food, chemical and metallurgical sectors
Expertise in performance improvement and organizational optimization
Proficiency in Lean Manufacturing tools
Ability to support, upskill and manage teams in contexts of major change prone to labour disputes (working with staff representatives)
Ability to handle crisis and stress situations

As a hands-on, team-builder, dynamic leader and effective communicator, you know how to motivate your teams!

Our assignments

6 to 12 months
assignments

Operational
management

C-level
roles

In France
or abroad 

managers de transition expérimentés

Using executive interim management within an Operations Department

Do you need to implement a lean management approach at one of your plants or roll out a new industrial tool for the food-processing industry? Are you looking to take over the management of a factory abroad? Is it time to structure your quality controls systems? Whatever the case, an experienced interim manager is a quick, efficient solution for you.

An assignment with Valtus

The right solution for your specific needs

Your Valtus Partner will identify your challenges and draw up a set of requirements to suggest a Chief Operations Officer who aligns with your needs.

During the assignment

The COO you choose to work with will start by assessing your company’s specific situation and recommend a step-by-step action plan which he will then implement. Ongoing updates with the Valtus Partner and the executive interim occur throughout the assignment.

Concluding the assignment

The interim manager, along with the Valtus Partner, will present a final report, which will include his recommended next steps. He will prepare the files to be handed over to the person who might be taking over his role. We will request your feedback and invite you to take part in our client satisfaction survey.

COO testimonials


“I enjoyed having an impact on the management of a German subsidiary by the parent company, which is also German. The outcomes were spectacular in terms of productivity, stock reduction and overall restoration of motivation.”
Didier J Baltus 
"The assignment’s context, rich in opportunities to enhance QHSE, was exciting."
Sonia Pitoux-Masson 
"Industrial site management is my core area of expertise. As mentioned before the assignment, I was entrusted with a great deal of independance in the decision-making process."
Stéphane Quenault