Food manufacturing · $85M revenue
Six weeks of finished goods, and still missing deliveries
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.
−38%
Finished goods inventory
96%
On-time delivery, from 86%
$2.1M
Capital expenditure avoided
Industrial distribution · $42M revenue
Every branch ordered like it was the only branch
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.
−24%
Inventory carrying cost
−61%
Expedited freight spend
$3.4M
Working capital released
Third-party logistics · $120M revenue
Profitable overall, losing money on a third of accounts
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.
31%
Accounts below cost identified