Recent Results

Oil Production

Issue: Oil producer was experiencing long and unpredictable plant maintenance turnarounds. Outage durations consistently exceeded plans and budgets resulting in lost production and excessive maintenance costs.
Solution: Applied lean techniques including:
- SMED (task separation, conversion, and simplification to complete outage tasks outside the outage window),
- Constraint Reduction (e.g., dramatically improved critical path management),
- Visual Controls (e.g., optimized Outage Command Center),
- Streamlined Collaborative Planning (e.g., earlier and greater involvement of contractors and cross functional personnel), and
- High impact metric capture and utilization (e.g., shift in focus from “Cost only” to Cost and Duration).
Result: Greater Profits – More stable outage planning and execution process with a reduction in outage durations of 10-15% resulting in increased production valued at $25 million increase in annual profit. Reduced Costs – Decrease in outage costs valued at $2-3 million annualized. Improved Collaboration – Significantly improved collaboration among all groups, greater performance reporting transparency, and improved continuous improvement through capture and application of lessons from one outage to another.

Global Machined Products Manufacturer

Issue: Too many warehouses, ever increasing distribution costs
Solution: Optimizing the current manufacturing and distribution network showed significant savings by relocating product lines and consolidating manufacturing and distribution footprint. A 2 DC solution was selected from 30 potential North American DC sites for parts distribution and imported finished goods.
Results: Reduction of 16% in total logistics cost

Industrial Components Distributor

Issue: High inventory
Solution: Used six sigma tools to identify that 40% of the inventory in the distribution center was obsolete
Results: Converted 70% of the dead inventory into cash through sales

Automotive Processing Center

Issue: Desire to delay needed expansion
Solution: Used lean flow and inventory management techniques
Results: Reduced manufacturing capacity utilization from 97% to 61% in 12 months, delaying a $25M investment by 7 years

Paper Industry Supplier

Automotive Parts Distributor

Issue: Warehouse storage capacity
Solution: Statistical safety stock to improve both inventory turns and order fill
Results: Reduced distribution center storage capacity utilization from 96% to 81% in 6 months, delaying a $30M investment by 5 years

Industrial Supplies Distributor

Issue: Slow moving raw material inventory
Solution: Implemented integrated commodity team management techniques and multi echelon inventory planning
Results: Improve total supply chain inventory turns from <4 to >6 on $100M

Plumbing Supplies Distributor