Faced with the shortage of welders, the Aube SME Baroclean has equipped itself with a robot which “improves working conditions”

“We prefer to provide better working conditions for our employees, so that they can concentrate on development and tasks with higher added value. » Lionel Fanti, the general manager of Baroclean, an SME Vendeuvre-sur-Barse, 30 km east of Troyes (Aube) specializing in cleaning vehicles, is very proud this Wednesday March 25 to present the new automated welding line to the president of the Grand-Est region Franck Leroy.

Baroclean is the French leader in sewer jetters, these trucks or vehicles of varying capacity, equipped with tanks and high-pressure pumps and dedicated to the maintenance of rainwater and wastewater sanitation networks. A know-how which requires workers specialized in industrial tools but for whom recruitment is becoming increasingly difficult.

“Today, the welder profession is a profession under pressure, with increasingly rare training, and competition from markets such as the naval sector, the EPR nuclear reactor sector and the military sector which will have a strong need for these employees,” notes Lionel Fanti.

By investing 300,000 euros, with the support of the Grand Est region, in two automated welding process machines, the Aube company will be able to increase its productivity without the risk of being faced with recruitment difficulties. However, it is not a question of eliminating jobs, but rather of offering more attractive positions. “At the same time, we are hiring,” insists the director.

“Usually, it takes more than seven hours of work, I’ll take an hour and a half”

“Our employees will be able to concentrate on tasks such as improving or creating new parts and also on tasks that are much less recurring and humanly and physically demanding,” assures Lionel Fanti. The new production line is made up of a laser welding process, and another “MIG” process, specifically adapted to aluminum, particularly for tanks.

The workers who use it have benefited from two weeks of training with the manufacturer, then two to three months of development within the Aube factory, like Maxime Beckius: “Basically, I arrived here as a welder and, little by little, I evolved. They talked about buying this machine and asked me if I was interested. I accepted, and here I am, programming and using this beautiful tool.”

The boilermaker seized this opportunity to develop new skills. “We will create the program, we will give it the trajectories and then we will tell it the welding functions… and it will go where we tell it to weld as we asked it. Afterwards, there are plenty of options,” explains Maxime. He takes the design of a false chassis as an example. “This is what goes between the real chassis of the vehicle and everything that we will adapt above it, that is to say the tank and all the equipment. Usually it takes more than seven hours of work. There, today, between the preparation and the welding, it will take me an hour and a half,” he rejoices.

A new rhythm that completely breaks the outdated image that persists around this type of profession. “As far as I’m concerned, dirty hands aren’t really true,” smiles Maxime. But now it’s less physical. We will put the pieces in more easily. And afterward, we are not doing them manually. During this time, I take care of the preparation which is less intense than the welding. And it’s the robot that does it and much more quickly. »

“If it can give young people the vocation of becoming a boilermaker…”

It is this daily life that the director of Baroclean wishes to promote, in order to attract new talents. “It can give young people the vocation to become a boilermaker, which is not a degrading profession, it is even rather qualifying when we see the working conditions today,” hopes Lionel Fanti.

Now with around a hundred employees (three-quarters in Vendeuvre-sur-Barse, the rest within the Cressent subsidiary in Sains-en-Gohelle in Pas-de-Calais), the Baroclean group has a turnover of 13 million euros in 2025. “With a projection of 16 million euros in 2026,” specifies the director. 17% of the activity is carried out in eleven other countries of the European Union. With the investment in the welding part, new perspectives should still open up for this nugget of the Aube industry.