The plant that holds the line — without you in it.
Ten years inside IKEA, Ford, Magna before founding the practice. Lean and quality management designed for the operation as it actually runs — not the org chart. Tolerance held on lot, claim rate held in single digits, productivity earned without new headcount.
Quality is a system, not a department.
Most plants don't have a quality problem. They have a system-design problem that surfaces as quality, then is fought with QC headcount. The right intervention sits one layer up.
We come into manufacturing engagements with a deliberately narrow first ask: where is the operation actually bleeding margin? Sometimes it's scrap on the cutting line. Sometimes it's customer returns concentrated in one SKU run by one shift. Sometimes — the most common one — it's a handoff that costs nothing in headcount and everything in re-work.
The diagnosis ranks them, in writing, by cost of the loss. We don't propose every Lean tool we know — we propose the two or three that the diagnosis says will move the metric agreed in the engagement contract. The work proves itself in the P&L, inside two to four weeks. Anything that doesn't, we don't recommend.
The tooling we bring in.
Only the tools the diagnosis said would matter. Not the whole Lean catalogue, not the textbook order.
Value-stream mapping.
Current state, future state, cycle-time baseline. The first artifact off every engagement; the language the rest of the work runs in.
Standard work.
Top five recurring tasks, documented, illustrated, and posted where the work happens. The baseline the operation can depend on without supervisor intervention.
5S — where it earns it.
Not as a posture. Applied to bottleneck cells where seek-time is the loss. Measured in seconds-recovered, not points-on-an-audit.
Statistical process control.
Control charts on the parameters the diagnosis identified as drift sources. Operator-readable, posted on the line, signed off by the shift.
APQP, end-to-end.
Advanced product quality planning for new program introductions. Phase-gated, PPAP-ready, evidenced — the work surfaced inside Ford and Magna, transposed to operations a fraction of the scale.
Quality-management system.
Designed, documented, audited inside one fiscal year — without halting production. A live document set the team owns after we leave.
Engagement shapes.
Manufacturing engagements typically take one of three shapes. The diagnosis tells us — and tells you — the right one before the contract is signed.
- Stabilization sprint
- Stop the bleed before any change is asked of the team. Standard work, quality gates at the top three failing handoffs, daily cadence the line will run. 4–8 weeks
- Cost-reduction project
- Defined metric, defined endpoint. Measured before/after on yield, claim rate, cycle time, or scrap. Typically pays for itself inside the engagement. 6–12 weeks
- QMS build & certify
- Quality-management system designed, documented, audited through ISO 9001 (or equivalent) inside a single fiscal year. Production not halted. 9–12 months
- Embedded operations director
- Fractional senior presence on a fixed cadence. The mode when an operation is in transition and the seat is vacant. Engagement is bounded, not open-ended. 12+ months
A solid-wood plant, two years in.
Yield +2.5%. Claim rate to 0.5%. Productivity +20%. Revenue +2B rubles over the engagement window. The team kept their headcount; the system absorbed the gain.