Capitalization of technical gestures with KIMEA: The story of GSF

Key figures

→ The first company in the sector to obtain triple QSE certification 

→ An international presence: United States, Canada, and United Kingdom

→ A European partner network (ECS) for clients seeking consistent service quality across their European sites.

GSF’s R&D department

At the heart of the GSF environment is Marie Battreau, a food engineering graduate and ergonomics trainee. She has been part of GSF for 23 years, working within the agri-food division of the Research & Development (R&D) department, which consists of nine team members.

The R&D department functions as an internal support unit whose role is to assist the operations teams, referred to internally as “exploitation”, which directly manage the cleaning staff on client sites. The R&D team ensures that operational teams have clearly identified client expectations, while also supporting them commercially (by helping draft proposals) and operationally, by conducting service audits and implementing specific training programs.

Beyond this support role, the R&D department, as its name suggests, is also responsible for innovation and service optimization in the cleaning and facility services sector, constantly seeking to improve methods and on-site practices. This work is cross-functional and spans several specialized divisions. Marie Battreau contributes specifically to the agri-food division, in line with her professional expertise.

As part of her role, she makes numerous recommendations, including recommendations on equipment, chemical products, and working methods, with particular attention paid to operator safety, although a dedicated department at headquarters manages safety in the strict sense.

Through its role as advisor, auditor, and trainer, the R&D department therefore provides both technical expertise and professional best practices. It not only transmits working methods, but also professional standards and good practices. It is also here that the initial reflection on ergonomics began, particularly regarding how to reduce the physical strain experienced by operators in their daily work.

Cleaning in this sector is particularly demanding and is based on two main complementary methods:

→ Cleaning of open surfaces: this involves removing visible dirt from accessible surfaces.

→ Cleaning closed surfaces: this includes tanks or equipment that can be cleaned at any time of day. This type of cleaning is less often outsourced and requires special expertise.

Before KIMEA: The challenge of sometimes tedious ergonomic studies

Within the group, a MSDs prevention initiative has existed for several years, led by the Integrated Management System (IMS) department and Margot Lecaque, the health, safety, and MSD prevention officer. For many years, workstation studies have been conducted by APTMS facilitators* in the agri-food sector.

For the past three years, Marie Battreau and one of her colleagues, Rémi Canepa, have been working on this topic with internal subject-matter experts and the IMS team. In the field, they quickly observed that operators were experiencing back problems, carpal tunnel pain (“the notorious pinch”), and other signs of fatigue caused by the repetition and difficulty of certain tasks.

Some practices even showed improvised adaptations, sometimes risky: certain operators modified their cleaning tools—for example, by attaching cable ties to spray guns to make them easier to use—which could introduce additional hazards.

APTMS: Facilitators for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) (French version : Animateurs de la Prévention des Troubles Musculosquelettiques (TMS)). 

A first macro-level analysis was launched with several collaborators who were well acquainted with the agri-food sector. However, the exercise proved more challenging than expected, as each collaborator had their own responsibilities, making it difficult to make progress. The available data were insufficient and not fully representative of on-site reality. To address these limitations, an additional resource was mobilized: a work-study student, Benoît Caron, who worked on the project for a year. Despite this support, the analysis remained tedious and time-consuming.

The internal training program to become an APTMS facilitator requires breaking down each operator’s activity to analyze their movements. This is a lengthy process and impractical to apply to all operators, given the diversity of roles and tasks.

With KIMEA: From mapping project to operational database creation

They remind operators of the expected best practices: maintaining a straight back, getting closer to the surface by kneeling rather than bending from a standing position, and so on.

“Tool” solutions

These may include, for example, the use of knee pads, or cleaning stations designed to work at height, avoiding tasks performed directly on the floor.

“Organizational” solutions

These involve different ways of structuring the workflow to reduce the duration or frequency of floor-level work.

“Client-related” solutions

Teams are dependent on the environment in which they operate. This includes interactions with the client, such as task allocation, environmental adjustments, or specific accommodations. These discussions can take place upfront during contract negotiation or during service delivery.

This allows the entire GSF Agri-Food community to access these recommendations directly. Thus, when a team wants to conduct an MSD prevention study at their site, they can draw from the IMS library of best practices and adapt them to local specifics.

This approach facilitates the capitalization of analyses, the standardization of practices, and the rapid dissemination of effective solutions across the network. It also provides a more detailed view of various operations, almost like “activity chronicles.”

KIMEA at the heart of Human interactions

Beyond its technical aspect, KIMEA has primarily helped bring teams together and create a space for dialogue around field practices.

The tool provided a shared basis for observation and analysis, facilitating exchanges between operators, supervisors, and subject-matter experts. These very concrete feedbacks made it possible to co-develop the solutions described above: work methods and job techniques, tools, organizational adjustments, and so on.

Highlighting Professional Expertise

Through the interviews conducted, Marie and her team gathered a significant amount of field feedback. All of this material is currently being synthesized, with a clear objective: to integrate these best practices into future internal training programs. Two internal trainers are already involved in this project and will ensure the dissemination of these practices once the training materials are finalized.

Beyond the content itself, this approach has helped create genuine “sponsors”. Everyone consulted during the interviews played a key role, participating through a remote working group where each person was able to contribute according to their capacity.

This sharing also made it possible to mobilize a wide range of profiles: active operators, supervisors, and even a retiree, happy to be consulted on his accumulated expertise. One question came up repeatedly during the interviews:

“How did you identify this preservation technique?”

→ “Through experience.”

And this is precisely where the challenge lies: GSF has highly skilled employees, but they are spread across different sites, and their empirical expertise has been built over many years… sometimes at the cost of physical strain.

As Marie summarizes: We cannot wait for everyone to wear themselves out “through experience” to discover the right techniques. Our goal is for newcomers to have them from the start.”

Early Benefits: A shift in perspective already underway

At this stage of the project, concrete results on the ground are still too early to report. Data compilation and dissemination are ongoing, which means the full operational impact cannot yet be measured. However, significant benefits are already being felt, particularly in terms of human, organizational, and relational aspects.

Simply communicating about the project and engaging a broad range of stakeholders (operators, supervisors, and subject-matter experts) has helped overcome an initial barrier: the sense of distance from the topic. It’s no longer an “external” subject, but a shared, understood, and appropriated issue among a diverse set of profiles, built through co-construction.

Client Benefits

Another major benefit concerns client relationships. As a service provider, the expectations are high, especially in the agri-food sector. Impeccable cleanliness is required, even in the most hard-to-reach areas, such as underneath machines, a task often invisible to clients.

Marie perfectly illustrates this invisibility of work:
“It’s a bit like buying a t-shirt from China: you don’t necessarily think about who made it. For agri-food products, it’s the same. If smoked salmon comes out of a factory ready to eat, it means an operator had to lie on the floor to clean under a machine.” This is a reality that some clients do not want to see, or even imagine.

Thanks to this project and KIMEA, the perception of cleaning work is evolving. Clients are becoming more aware of awkward postures, the effort required, and the acceptable limits. They better understand why certain requests can be difficult, or why specific accommodations are necessary.

This project has already helped raise awareness, foster mutual understanding, and enhance recognition of the real work, both internally and with clients. It is a key first lever for ensuring future success.

The Added Value of the tool ?

For Marie, the real added value of KIMEA can be summed up in two words: efficiency and credibility.

KIMEA has enabled the team to be more effective in analyzing their cleaning activities, handling a large number of situations with numerous operators. This makes the results more representative and legitimate when shared.

What does the future hold for the tool at GSF?

For Marie, the next step is to extend the study to the “dry” agri-food sector, particularly in biscuit production, where cleaning relies on scraping, vacuuming, and manual wiping. The goal is to gradually cover the entire agri-food sector by the end of 2026 – early 2027.

More broadly, the expansion of KIMEA to other GSF branches or sectors is still to be determined. For now, no official decision has been made, but the tool is generating growing interest.