About Fabien Charneux, General Manager

For twenty years I grew with SNOP, an automotive stamping and assembly group that went from about €630M of revenue in 2010 to €1.85bn in 2024 and ranks among Europe’s Tier 1 leaders. I moved from project management, with up to €80M of equivalent annual revenue and €30M of CAPEX under my teams, to bringing three acquired plants onto the group production system and SAP, created the innovation function, then ran the group’s China subsidiaries from 2019 and led the sale of the plant when the group reorganised. In China I led the business through two legal entities and seven direct reports: a plant of up to 150 people and €20M of revenue, and a tooling engineering and purchasing company, plus a sales office in Shanghai. The path there ran from matrix project teams to a department of direct reports, a group function, then a country with its own management team.

With the plant sold, I chose the opposite scale on purpose: to build processes rather than run established ones. FFG Bags is a young, French-led technical-bag factory of about 150 people in Vietnam, and the mandate is to move a small, people-dependent business onto processes, management systems and reliable data, so it serves customers consistently and keeps growing safely. Revenue is up 20 to 25 % in two years. A clearer development offer and a website rebuilt for search and AI answer engines multiplied inbound enquiries, and customer requests no bag factory could serve became FFG Industrial, an engineering offer launched in September 2026. The hardest lesson was not designing processes but changing habits: in a small company an activity often rests on one person, so a change has to be built with them, not for them. My Executive MBA gives me the frame for both the strategic and the operational side.

People come first in how I manage. In France, China and Vietnam I have worked on the same things: clear and regular communication, managers who coach rather than only control, and moments that let a group become a team. That mattered most in hard periods, such as Covid and the sale of the China plant. My test of a good team is that it holds together without its leader.

Data and AI are my lever. Structured data turns individual know-how into company capability, and AI makes it usable at a scale a small team could not reach alone. One rule guides the work: each piece of information is entered once, then reused and tracked across the company, with people keeping every decision that matters.