Project Cases
Industry: Manufacturing (revenue $25 million)
Challenge(s): Evaluate costing in the business post-2020. Re-size the business according to reduced revenues and climbing cost inputs. Get a firm grip on true costs. Deal with high fixed costs while developing a nimble model that allows the business to expand and contract as needed.
Delivered: A sustainable costing model to preserve the business as a going concern and launch new initiatives that increased gross profit leading to a greater financial foothold.
Business Results:
• The business was able to sustain itself, weather a difficult time, and transform operations utilizing new technology to be more profitable. This new model allowed the business to expand in high-demand periods and contract during slowdowns without accumulating losses.
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Project Fish
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Project Blackhawk
Industry: Industrial Manufacturing (revenue - $25 million)
Challenge(s): Highly leveraged, poorly operated site with over 60% equipment downtime, workplace safety issues / climbing WCB premiums, poor employee engagement and morale – a “given up” culture lacking trust, major equipment functionality issues, no troubleshooting or maintenance in place – a “run to fail” approach. The long-term goal was to transform the business and prepare it for sale to private equity buyers.
Delivered:
Performed a comprehensive assessment of the business including pending capital projects, existing assets / equipment, personnel, safety, operations, and costing / finance. Performed RCA, 5Y and FMEA to understand the current facility issues and causes. Developed a budget and capital plan with milestones to rebuild the struggling facility. Planned (GANTT), compiled and led rebuild and annual shutdown schedule. This included downtime and commissioning of the new facility in a short period of time so as not to interrupt the market supply. Learned the key issues, process, and main drivers to producing a quality product. Completed multimillion dollar brownfield chemical plant design, construction and rebuild. In tandem, a full-scale facility maintenance (RCM) and reliability program was created, successfully implemented, and adhered to. This included a full-scale inspection, lubrication, and preventative maintenance work order schedule as well as an asset management plan & spare parts ranking, analysis, and plan. Created a full-scale safety program and plant training program complete with SOPs for every task. The project addressed epidemic product quality issues, downtime and engineering issues plaguing and fatiguing the plant. The project was severely time and budget constrained with ongoing pressure to satisfy customer needs. Plant commissioning and budget spend came in on time and under budget.
Business Results:
• Fully re-engaged workforce.
• Successfully completed root cause analysis, re-engineered prototype equipment rendering it operational and functioning.
• Full costing assessment, cost reduction and reallocation of funds on P&L geared towards EBITDA improvements.
• Achieved employee engagement and buy in on maintenance program leading to over 95% of equipment maintenance and repair completed in house.
• Lost time accidents went to zero over a 12-month period alongside a creative return to work program.
• Facility output increased 248%, the highest capacity plant of it’s type in North America.
• Unplanned Downtime before the project exceeded 60%, following project completion unplanned downtime fell to 1-2% and is maintained.
• A flexible organization that can expand and contract to volatile seasonal demands.
• Capital budget for plant construction came in below target budget.
• Trailing 12-month EBITDA increased over $1 million.
• Improvement of internal controls, reduced cost / ton of product by 32%.
• Organization became a leader and a force to be reckoned with in the market leading to interest and a letter of intent to sell the transformed enterprise to a Private Equity owned competitor.
Industry: Recycling (revenue $15.2 billion annually)
Challenge(s): Evaluate and present viability of recycling technologies including collection, sorting, and processing to the executive team.
Delivered: Collection and sorting options at three tiers of production - <60,000 lbs, >60,000 lbs and a permanent high-volume facility. Researched and identified best practices partner.
Business Results:
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Produced an ad-hoc P&L business model for manually sorting 17 million lbs per year to utilize as a benchmark against automated processes such as Sensor technology, conveyor belts, bar codes, RFID, NIR or robotics.
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Project Goat
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Project Malinois
Industry: Manufacturing (construction) (revenue - $200 million)
Challenge(s): Assist the CEO and BOD in preparing the organization for sale by two private equity owners. The focused problem was an obsolete outdated system the organization was using for producing construction components. The system used printers that were irreplaceable and had the potential to cripple the organization if they failed. The system functioned as a stand-alone without integrating the sales or finance process. The current ERP/MRP provider did not have the capability to modify their program to create a new system and integrate it with order entry, production, and financial reporting.
Delivered: A multimillion code line configurator written in excel that encompassed the sales process (order entry), production process and integrated the existing Vantage program for financial reporting. Flash reports were subsequently designed to show real time job status. Initially the program was constructed in a newly created test environment as to not obstruct the operation. Users were gradually created and trained as testing was completed. This included reverse engineering the product lineup to write a program that generated cut sheets and production orders automatically instead of the previous manual method.
Business Results:
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A fully integrated automated configurator that drastically reduced manual data entry and fully integrated a push and pull of information interdepartmentally eliminating information silos and the risk of a failed irreplaceable system.
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Positively contributed to trailing 12-month EBITDA through the reduction of order delays / bottlenecks and manual data entry.
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Checked an important box required to complete the sale of the business.
Industry: Food Manufacturing (revenue $6 billion annually)
Challenge(s): Work with the Vice President of the Sales group to solve high turnover in the sales force due to a lack of excel and software skills as well as a lack of data processing / calculation capability. Assess various competencies among applicants into the sales team including excel and other software knowledge. This seemed basic at the time, but the client had tried all sorts of screening tools and wanted something tailored to their business and specifically to a sales role.
Delivered: A custom screening tool (with automated answer key) designed specifically for the sales force to pinpoint specific strengths and shortcomings of incoming candidates. A tool that also assesses a candidate’s ability to navigate sales data and present it to executive teams.
Business Results:
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Achieved a higher degree of more qualified incoming talent due to a more refined and specific hiring process. We were the only ones that listened to what this client needed and did exactly what was required without changing the specification or modifying it. The result was well worth it and showed us that a simple tool can greatly impact an organization.
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Project Chinook
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Project Oracle
Industry: Custom Heavy Duty Manufacturing (revenue $200 million)
Challenge(s): Struggling with their own P&L, the BOD and new private equity owners were searching for industry competitor intel.
Delivered: Information was compiled and delivered to the client on competitor organizational structure, product / delivery issues with client, a general 360 market evaluation of the clients’ performance including field feedback from lost customers and the reasons why they sought product with competing organizations.
Industry: Food Manufacturing (revenue $18 billion annually)
Challenge(s): Reporting to the BOD / Executive team, achieve a corporate mandate of 3% downtime / 3% waste for ten plants ($500 million P&L). The poorest performing facilities were measuring more than 30% downtime.
Delivered: With the main focus the largest and newest plant (110,000 square feet, budget $30 million) conducted an assessment and root cause analysis of the issues plaguing the 24/7 heavily automated plant. Revamped the collection of downtime data to include more information up front as well as troubleshooting findings, fixes and follow up. Tackling the biggest downtime offenders and repeat issues first, began a troubleshooting 5-why process with the maintenance team. Dealt with difficult, uncooperative prototype robotic equipment. Created a system utilizing CMMS for issuing work orders (maintenance and capital work orders) and prioritizing critical spare parts. Completely built a comprehensive preventative and predictive maintenance program with a heavy hand on planning due to the lack of available downtime. Organized the 12 hours per week allocated for down time work, including leading and dispatching a contract maintenance team. Creatively moved “downtime maintenance” into the up-time schedule. Aligned three different unions (production, maintenance, and sanitation). Engaged the operators to look for issues and participate in the fixes. Re-engaged a disgruntled old school maintenance department by actively listening and establishing a coalition for change. Developed a “Gemba Walk” culture and implemented a Total Productive Maintenance System geared toward plant reliability. This system included:
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Downtime tracking and real time feedback
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World class troubleshooting
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Post downtime issue monitoring to confirm the issue is not returning
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Preventative work orders (inspection, lubrication, parts replacement)
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Predictive work orders (inspection)
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Spare parts system including inventory counts, Kanban levels, lead times, prices, part numbers and risk assessment
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Capital projects
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Most importantly employee engagement from production to sanitation through to maintenance, with each department participating in the initiative and taking ownership
Business Results:
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Within 3 months achieved 3% downtime and 3% waste in the poorest performing facilities.
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Saw a greater level of employee engagement within a unionized environment (up to three different unions within one facility).
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Through success over ten facilities, positively contributed to EBITDA and brought maintenance and capital budgets back on target.
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Project NightOps
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Project Stone
Industry: Food Manufacturing (revenue $100 million annually)
Challenge(s): Difficulty hiring and retaining qualified candidates. An out of touch wage scale and lack of real time data created a low closing rate on job offers presented to first choice candidates.
Delivered: Comprehensive area specific wage scale data.
Business Results:
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Improved decision making on annual budget process and organizational structure.
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An improved offer to closing ratio on first choice candidates.