What the work looks like

The company was carrying six weeks of finished goods inventory and still missing 14% of promised delivery dates. Leadership assumed a capacity problem and had begun quoting a second production line.

The diagnostic found the constraint was changeover sequencing, not capacity. Production was batching to minimise changeovers, which inflated inventory while starving the SKUs customers actually ordered that week. We rebuilt the scheduling logic around demand signal instead of changeover convenience, and retrained four supervisors on the new sequencing rules.

Five regional branches each ran their own purchasing, with no shared view of stock. The same slow-moving part sat in three warehouses while a fourth expedited it by air freight.

We segmented the catalogue by demand variability and value, set differentiated stocking policy per segment, and introduced a weekly inter-branch balancing routine. No new software — the existing ERP held the data, nobody had been asked to look at it across branches.

The business was growing and profitable in aggregate. Nobody could say which accounts made money, because cost-to-serve had never been allocated below the site level.

We built an activity-based cost model down to account level. Thirty-one percent of accounts were being served below cost — including two of the five largest. The client repriced eleven accounts, exited three, and restructured the pricing model for new business.