Business Efficiency

Most manufacturing SMEs we meet are not short of work. They are short of flow. Orders arrive, the shop floor is full, overtime is routine — and yet margin is thinner than the quotes said, and promised dates slip. This is work for owners and managing directors in aerospace, defence and advanced manufacturing who suspect the problem is structural rather than a people problem, and want someone who has run a factory to come and look.

Where the money is actually going

Waste in a machine shop or assembly operation rarely announces itself. It hides in queue time between operations, in jobs that are 90 per cent finished and waiting on one bought-in part, in the inspection loop that catches the same defect every month, and in the setup that takes four hours because nobody has been given time to improve it. We start by following the work, not the organisation chart.

Typically that means:

• Mapping the value stream for your highest-volume or highest-pain product family, from order receipt to despatch
• Separating the time that adds value from the time that merely passes
• Measuring what is already there — OTIF, scrap and rework, machine availability, inventory turns — and being honest about which numbers you can trust
• Costing the gap, so improvement work competes on financial grounds rather than enthusiasm
• Testing whether the plant layout and production control method still match the mix you sell today

Restructuring around the customer

Efficiency is not cost-cutting. It is removing the activity your customer would never pay for while protecting the activity they buy from you. That usually means rebalancing cells to takt, pulling work rather than pushing it, introducing standard work where variation is costing you, and putting visual control in place so a shift leader sees a problem in ten seconds rather than at the Monday meeting.

Doug Allen leads this work. He spent his early career in foundries, watching capable businesses decline because nobody measured anything, then learned the discipline properly at Goodrich Aerospace and as Head of Facilities and Continuous Improvement at Moog. The methods are lean and they are not new. The skill is knowing which three to apply in your plant, in what order, and how to make them survive a busy Tuesday.

How the engagement runs

We begin with a diagnostic on site — walking the floor, reading the data, talking to the people who do the work — and come back with a written assessment of where the loss sits and what it is worth. From there we agree a small number of improvement projects with named owners, target measures and dates. We work alongside your team rather than in a side room, because the improvement has to be theirs by the end of it. Work is scoped to a defined result, so you know what you are buying and how you will know it worked.

Frequently asked questions

How quickly would we see something change?

The first measurable movement usually comes from a single cell or process within the first few weeks, because quick wins fund credibility for the harder structural work. Deeper changes — layout, production control, supplier flow — take longer and depend on how much management time you can protect for them. We will not promise you a number before seeing your operation.

Will this mean redundancies?

That is not the aim and it is rarely the outcome. The usual result of freeing up capacity is that you take more work through the same plant without adding cost, or stop paying for overtime and expedited freight. If headcount is genuinely the issue, we will say so plainly rather than dress it up as an efficiency programme.

We already run continuous improvement. What do you add?

Quite often an internal CI function has the tools but not the air cover, or has drifted into running events instead of closing financial gaps. An outside pair of eyes sees what everyone has stopped noticing. If your CI capability is sound, we would rather coach it than duplicate it.