Services
Six ways we earn our fee
Each of these begins with the same diagnostic discipline and ends with something your team can run without us. Where they overlap, we say so rather than selling you two engagements.
Manufacturing Process Optimization
Most plants are not short of capacity so much as short of visibility into where it goes. We measure rather than estimate.
The work starts on the floor: cycle times observed, changeovers timed, scrap and rework traced to a cause, downtime attributed honestly rather than to the catch-all bucket. From that we build a picture of true available capacity and what it would cost to recover each slice of it.
What comes out is a ranked list, not a philosophy. Some items are a fixture change and a shift briefing; others are a genuine capital case. We separate the two clearly so you can fund the first this month.
Typical scope
- Constraint and bottleneck analysis across the value stream
- Cycle time, changeover and OEE baselining
- Scrap, rework and yield loss root-cause work
- Layout and material flow review
- Labour standards and shift pattern assessment
- Maintenance and downtime attribution
- Capital versus operational fix comparison
Digital Transformation & Industry 4.0
The technology is rarely the hard part. Deciding what is worth instrumenting, and getting people to use it, is.
We assess your current ERP, MES and shop-floor data against the decisions the business actually needs to make. Often the gap is not a missing platform but a report nobody trusts, a master data problem, or three systems holding three versions of the same number.
Where a new system is justified, we help you specify and select it, and we are frank about implementation cost and disruption — including the months when output usually dips. Where it is not justified, we will say so, which is not a conversation every adviser is willing to have.
Typical scope
- ERP and MES fitness assessment
- Master data quality and governance review
- Shop-floor data capture and OEE instrumentation
- Reporting and KPI rationalisation
- System selection support and vendor evaluation
- Implementation planning, sequencing and risk
- Realistic benefit case, including the dip
Supply Chain & Logistics Strategy
This is our deepest bench. Category strategy, supplier negotiation and freight cost work across raw materials, packaging and every mode of transport.
Our experience spans paper and paperboard, aluminium foil, inks and coatings, adhesives, packaging formats, IT equipment and services, and logistics in all modes. That specificity matters in a negotiation: knowing how a supplier's cost base moves is the difference between a discount and a durable price.
On the logistics side we analyse freight spend at shipment level, test carrier rates against the market, and look at the routing and mode decisions that get made informally. Transport is the spend category that most often escapes scrutiny simply because no single invoice looks large.
Typical scope
- Spend analysis and category segmentation
- Category strategy for raw materials and packaging
- RFP design, supplier negotiation and award
- Should-cost and index-based pricing models
- Freight cost analysis and carrier negotiation
- Mode, routing and network review
- Inventory policy and working capital
- Supplier risk, dual-sourcing and continuity
Operational Turnaround
For businesses under pressure from a lender, an owner or a board — where the order of operations matters as much as the plan.
Cash comes first. We build a short-horizon cash view you can actually rely on, find the levers that move it within weeks, and stabilise the position before touching anything structural. Only then do we move to margin, and after that to the harder questions about footprint, portfolio and organisation.
Turnaround work is also a stakeholder exercise. We help you produce a plan that can be put in front of a lender or an investment committee without apology, and we will tell you privately if the numbers do not support the story you were hoping to tell.
Typical scope
- 13-week cash flow build and management
- Rapid margin and contribution analysis by product and customer
- Quick-win cost actions with owners and dates
- Supplier and payment term renegotiation
- Footprint, portfolio and make-versus-buy review
- Lender and board reporting pack
- Interim operational or financial leadership
Growth & Expansion Planning
Growth breaks operations more often than it breaks demand. We model what the business will actually need before you commit.
Whether it is a new line, a new plant, a new region or an acquisition, the business case usually captures revenue and capital and understates everything else: the supervision, the qualification time, the working capital, the year of reduced yield while a new workforce learns. We put those in.
On acquisitions we bring genuine integration experience — diligence on operations and sourcing, then the unglamorous work of merging systems, consolidating spend and capturing the synergies that were promised.
Typical scope
- Capacity modelling and expansion options
- New site selection and start-up planning
- Operational and sourcing due diligence
- Acquisition integration planning and delivery
- Synergy identification and tracking
- Working capital and cash impact of growth
- Make-versus-buy and outsourcing analysis
Change Management & Training
The reason improvement programmes fail is almost never analytical. It is that nobody owned the new way of working once the consultants left.
We build the change into the engagement rather than bolting it on: supervisors involved in designing the standard they will hold, managers trained on the reporting they will run, and a clear line of ownership for every process we touch.
Where a client wants capability rather than a project, we will simply teach — negotiation practice for a buying team, cost analysis for finance, structured problem solving for plant leadership.
Typical scope
- Stakeholder mapping and communication planning
- Standard work design with the people who will use it
- Supervisor and manager coaching
- Negotiation and category management training
- Structured problem solving for plant teams
- Governance, cadence and reporting handover
- Post-engagement review at 90 days
Not sure which of these you need?
That is a normal place to start. Describe the symptom and we will tell you which engagement fits — or that none of them do.