2009. An aerospace subcontracting workshop outside Paris. Three employees, solid mechanical know-how, and an uncertain future. That's where this story begins. The story of a family business that became a supplier to Boeing and Rolls-Royce, then built a platform capable of listening to machines in real time. Damien Marc told it in full on the American podcast Industry Ignited.
It all starts with a choice
The family business, JPB Système, has been around since 1995. The father built it with his own hands. When Damien Marc takes over, the question isn't whether to keep things running as they are. It's whether there's something bigger to build here, inside this small workshop, or whether it's better to move on.
He chooses to build.
Not out of nostalgia. Out of a conviction that this company holds potential no one has seen yet. But he also knows that getting there will mean rethinking everything: the product, the market, the very way the business is run.
What he doesn't yet realize is just how winding the road will be.
First lesson: you can't scale a company by doing everything yourself
The early years follow the classic survival playbook of an SME leader: you do it all. Production, sales, operations, strategy. When there are only three of you, you don't delegate. And it works, for a while.
But a glass ceiling appears quickly. To scale, you have to accept a radical shift in posture. Stop being the one who produces and start being the one who builds the organization. Stop being the best technician in the building and start being the leader who surrounds himself with people who are better than him at every specific thing.
In the interview, this transition is described as the hardest part of the entire journey. Harder than landing a contract with Boeing. Harder than raising capital. Because it touches something deeper: the ego, the very identity of the founder.
Hiring in industry: the résumé isn't enough
This is one of the strongest moments in the conversation. Damien Marc is candid about certain hiring mistakes, the ones that cost time, energy, and sometimes disrupted internal dynamics.
Looking back, he shares a conviction forged through experience: in a demanding industrial environment, technical skills aren't always enough. The ability to collaborate, adapt to the realities of the shop floor, and fit into a company culture is just as decisive. A profile that looks great on paper can still fail to find its place if there's a disconnect on these fronts.
Today, the focus is on people who can adapt, learn quickly, and thrive in fast-moving environments. Drive, curiosity, and mindset matter as much as expertise. In some cases, when the cultural fit just isn't there, tough decisions have to be made.
Not out of rigidity, but in the interest of coherence and collective performance.
It's that very rigor that allowed JPB to grow from 3 to over 200 people while keeping its original DNA intact.
The bolt that changed everything
Originally, JPB Système is a subcontractor. It makes parts for others. But very quickly, the ambition outgrows subcontracting: there needs to be a proprietary product, a value proposition that belongs to JPB alone.
The innovation is born from a problem every aerospace engine manufacturer knows well: vibration. Inside a jet engine, everything vibrates. And when everything vibrates, bolts come loose. A loose bolt inside a turbofan engine means a major safety risk, massive maintenance costs, and hours of grounded aircraft.
JPB develops a self-locking fastener capable of withstanding these extreme vibrations without human intervention. A component that looks simple, almost mundane. But whose engineering is ruthlessly precise.
This product opens the doors to the biggest names in the business: Boeing, GE Aviation, Rolls-Royce, Safran. Names that, for an SME with a few dozen employees, seemed out of reach.
Growth accelerates. JPB expands from the Paris region to three production sites: France, Poland, Cincinnati. The order book explodes.
But the story doesn't end there. By developing fasteners for the most demanding environments in the world, a deep understanding of what happens at the heart of industrial machines was built: the vibrations, the stresses, the signals that nobody takes the time to listen to. And it's from that shop-floor knowledge that an entirely different idea is about to emerge.
Making the unintelligent intelligent: the birth of Keyprod
Keyprod is a radically different venture, born from a simple observation after years spent in production workshops: most manufacturers have zero real-time visibility into what their machines are actually doing.
The data is there. It lives in the vibrations, the sounds, the micro-variations of every piece of equipment. But nobody is capturing it. Nobody is listening. And by the time someone gets around to it, it's usually too late: the breakdown has happened, the cycle time has drifted, the non-conforming parts have already been produced.
Keyprod was born from that frustration: why is it so hard to know what's happening on your own shop floor?
The analogy used in the podcast is striking: Keyprod is the Shazam of manufacturing. Just as Shazam identifies a song by listening to a few seconds of music, Keyprod identifies a machine's status by listening to its vibrations.
Here's how it works: you attach a sensor, Keynetic or Keyvibe, by simple magnetization to any production machine. No wiring. No heavy IT integration. No need to connect your ERP or MES. The IoT listens. It captures vibration signatures, analyzes them through an algorithm embedded on an FPGA chip, and transmits the data to the Keyprod cloud platform.
Within minutes, the production manager, or the operator themselves, can see on their screen, in real time: how many parts have been produced, at what cycle rate, whether the machine is running or stopped, the line's OEE, and where the bottlenecks are.
What seemed impossible ten years ago, having a clear, instant view of what's happening on the shop floor without an 18-month IT project, becomes a plug-and-play reality.
The COVID bet: accelerating when everyone else is braking
March 2020. The world stops. Aerospace, JPB Système's core sector, takes a direct hit. Order books shrink. OEMs freeze investments. The temptation is strong to do what everyone else does: cut costs, wait it out.
The choice made is the exact opposite.
Accelerate Keyprod's development. Invest heavily in R&D, in the product, in the team. While the sector is in survival mode, switch to building mode.
Why? Because crises reshuffle the deck. Those who invest while others pull back gain a massive head start. When the market restarts, and it always restarts, they're ready. Everyone else has to sprint just to catch up.
The bet paid off. When industry roared back with an urgent need for digitalization, Keyprod was there. Mature solution, team in place, field-tested sensors. Ready to deploy.
Beyond the sensor: data as the new raw material
A crucial point in the interview goes beyond hardware. The sensor is only the entry point. The real value lies in what you do with the data once it's collected.
Today, most manufacturers operate in reactive mode. A machine goes down? You intervene. A quality defect appears? You fix it. OEE drops? You investigate, often too late.
What Keyprod's AI layer enables is the shift to predictive. Detecting a cycle-time drift before it becomes a stoppage. Identifying an abnormal vibration pattern before it turns into a breakdown. Anticipating rather than reacting.
It's a paradigm shift for the shop floor. The operator is no longer the one who notices problems, they become the one who prevents them. The production director no longer manages by rearview mirror, they manage in real time, backed by data.
And that's exactly what Industry 4.0 should be: not an abstract concept reserved for multinational corporations, but a concrete, accessible tool that changes the daily reality of the people who actually make things.
What this story tells us
What comes through in this interview, beyond the numbers and the technology, is a coherent trajectory. Not that of a startup founder who discovered manufacturing on a PowerPoint slide, but of a path forged in the workshop, surrounded by machines, cutting oil, and the sound of CNC spindles at 6,000 RPM.
Industrial innovation doesn't have to come from Silicon Valley. It can be born in a 3-person workshop outside Paris, driven by years spent making things, observing, and by one simple question: "What if we actually listened to what our machines have to say?"
That question gave birth to Keyprod. And that same conviction, that every machine has something to say if you give yourself the means to hear it, drives every development of the solution today.
Watch the full episode: Industry Ignited, Ep. 81: "Building a Global Company from Scratch"
Want to hear what your machines have to say? Request a Keyprod demo
