Discovery internship · Spring 2023

Manufacture Française de Bougies

First professional experience: a four-week discovery internship at a scented-candle manufacturer in Provence, in the middle of an ERP migration. Mostly observation; one real deliverable — documenting the goods-reception process for the new system.

Context

The ESAIP integrated cycle places first-year students in a short discovery internship — a rapport d'étonnement is the official framing. The point is not to ship code; the point is to be surprised by how a real workplace operates and to write down what you noticed.

I spent four weeks at the Manufacture Française de Bougies, an SME founded in 2008 that makes scented candles in Provence, near Grasse — the world capital of perfumery. At the time of the internship the company was running an ERP migration, with two vendors on the shortlist: Sylob and Microsoft Dynamics 365. My maître de stage placed me directly in that workstream.

The mission

The team was working through the question "which ERP fits the way we actually work?", and the prerequisite turned out to be a different question: "how do we actually work?" A handful of existing processes had to be written down explicitly before they could be modelled in either system.

The process I was given to document was goods reception — what happens when a delivery arrives at the production site. Walk the warehouse, talk to the logistics team, map the steps from pallet transfer through quantity verification to ERP entry, then write it up in a format the integrators could use during the rollout. The deliverable was modest in scope; what made it useful was that nobody had bothered to write it down before.

What I noticed

The biggest surprise — the rapport d'étonnement is designed to capture this — was how much of an SME actually runs on people rather than on systems. The company had grown from an artisanal workshop to roughly fifty employees; many of its operational processes lived in the heads of specific people. The ERP migration was as much about extracting that knowledge as about choosing software.

The second surprise was the world itself. Scented candles look simple from the outside — wax, wick, fragrance. From the inside, it is a logistics-heavy business with deep supplier relationships in fragrance (Grasse is half an hour up the road), strong seasonal demand, and a manufacturing process where small changes in temperature or pour speed shift the finished product. None of this was on my radar before walking the floor.

And then the meetings. The internship sat me in cross-functional rooms — administration, R&D, lab, manufacturing, logistics — for the first time, listening to people argue priorities. That is where most of the actual learning happened, far more than at any keyboard.

What I took away

Two practical takeaways. First, the value of writing things down. The goods-reception document was useful precisely because the process had been working on tacit knowledge until someone slowed down and put it on paper. The exercise sounds basic; the impact was disproportionate to the effort.

Second, the moment the ERP discussion turned concrete: Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the more flexible but more expensive option, Sylob the leaner but more constrained one. Watching the trade-off discussed in real time was the first time I saw enterprise software being chosen for organisational fit rather than feature checklists. That framing stayed with me.