Work · 34 engagements since 2017

Cases with their workings shown.

Every figure carries its measurement basis. Clients under NDA are described by sector, region and turnover — never loosened to make a better story.

−23%

FIG. BASIS — FY24 vs FY23 · management accounts, finance-director signed

CHANGEOVER, MIN

UNIT COST, INDEXED

100

Unit cost down 23% at a sheet-metal fabricator

South Yorkshire · £28m turnover · 140 staff · 9 months

SITUATION: Family-owned fabricator squeezed between steel prices and fixed-price contracts. Unit cost had risen 9% in two years; quoting had stopped keeping up.
THE WORK: Diagnostic Fortnight found the constraint wasn’t labour — it was changeover time on two brake presses and a quoting model blind to batch size. Redesigned changeovers with the setters (38 minutes to 11), rebuilt the quoting model with the estimator, repriced the worst 20% of the book.
OUTCOME: Unit cost down 23% in nine months. Two loss-making contracts exited on renewal. The setters now run their own changeover reviews; the fix survived us leaving — which is the actual test.

+41%

FIG. BASIS — OTIF, 12-week rolling average vs same period prior year

OTIF, %

East Midlands · £55m turnover · 300 staff · 6 months

SITUATION: A supermarket-facing producer one failed audit away from delisting. On-time-in-full at 61% and falling; planning run on a spreadsheet only one person could drive.
THE WORK: The fortnight showed planning wasn’t the root — a single packing line was the hidden constraint, starved by upstream batching logic. Resequenced the batching with the shift leads, moved two SKUs to a co-packer, made OTIF visible on the floor daily instead of monthly in a deck.
OUTCOME: OTIF from 61% to 86% inside six months — past the retailer’s 85% threshold. The delisting review was cancelled. The planning spreadsheet is now a team of two and a system the next hire can learn in a week.

−£1.9m

FIG. BASIS — stock + WIP reduction · audited year-end accounts

STOCK COVER, WEEKS

West Midlands · £85m turnover · 3 sites · 12 months

SITUATION: PE-backed precision components group with cash trapped in stock nobody trusted: 14 weeks of cover on paper, stockouts on the floor anyway.
THE WORK: Counted what was actually there (8% of the system stock didn’t exist), rebuilt safety-stock logic SKU by SKU with the buyers, and put kill-dates on every WIP batch over 30 days. The hard part was political: one site’s ‘just in case’ culture had a decade of history. We did the workings in the open until the numbers won.
OUTCOME: £1.9m out of stock and WIP in twelve months, audited, with stockouts down not up. The buyers run the safety-stock review quarterly without us.