Industrial Program Director - Sorting, Automation & AI - Freelance

Project overview

We are supporting a major French industrial group in recycling and waste management, which is relaunching its program to modernize sorting centers using data, automation, and artificial intelligence. The program aims to increase chain availability, improve sorting quality, anticipate blockages and deviations, automate flow regulation, and better manage site performance.

A reframing mission has just been completed: priority use cases and main architectural choices have been established. The client is now looking for the program director who will take charge of the program, reframe it, and then put it back into execution, managed internally for the time being until internal recruitment.

Your missions:

Expected results:

Practical information:

• Take overall responsibility for the program: ambition, scope, dependencies, budget, milestones, and success criteria
• Build the relaunch trajectory: business cases, availability, throughput, and quality KPIs, workload plan, risks, governance, and Go/No Go decisions
• Manage the transition from POC to pilot and then to deployment, with a strong field presence and hypercare during commissioning
• Arbitrate make, buy, or co-development choices (business value, TCO, interoperability, cybersecurity, data, intellectual property)
• Challenge IT/OT architectures, automation, supervision, sensors, industrial vision, and AI models
• Unite site managers, operators, equipment manufacturers, and integrators, and secure decisions from sponsors and the steering committee
• Supervise approximately 5 FTEs within a team of 10 to 15 contributors: PMO, process and automation engineers, data scientists and vision specialists, IT/OT architects, site referents, and external partners
• A clarified and validated scope, a constituted team, and effective governance
• Use cases prioritized by value, each with its business case, KPIs, and make or buy decision
• Stabilized pilots at priority sites, measured gains, and a substantiated generalization decision
• Location: Paris (2 days per week) and Nantes (1 day per week), plus 2 days of remote work
• Regular travel to 3 pilot sites (Île-de-France, Lyon region, Normandy), then to other sorting centers in France
• Start date: as soon as possible
• Duration: long-term mission, until an internal director is recruited
• Status: freelance
• Daily rate: €1,000 to €1,100 net of tax per day

Project details

• Start: flexible
• Remote: hybrid
• Location: Paris, France, FR
• Rate: 125-138 EUR/h
• Languages: French