PROCESS ASSESSMENT & RECOVERY
The P&L says margin problem. The floor says something else. I find out which one is telling the truth.
For manufacturers whose process is underperforming
The situation
Scrap is climbing. Yield fell and nobody can say exactly when, or why. The new line that justified the capital never reached the rate in the plan. Or the letter arrived: your biggest customer is asking about corrective actions, and resourcing is now a word people use in meetings.
Everyone in the building has a theory — the equipment, the powder lot, the operators, the customer’s spec. The theories don’t agree, and while they argue, the losses continue. What’s missing isn’t effort. It’s an independent diagnosis from someone who has stood in front of this exact problem with their own P&L on the line.
Why me
I’ve been handed broken processes as an operator, not a bystander. A magnesium molding division that was losing money on paper for “margin” reasons — until the floor showed the truth: immature machines down more than up, and an OEM spare-parts monopoly bleeding the maintenance budget. We reverse-engineered the spares, stabilized the process, and the “margin problem” disappeared without touching price or headcount. The losses weren’t where the statements pointed.
And I’ve fixed the deeper version: a company that could make parts but not reliably, because the engineering staff had never been taught to read a process statistically — a certificate on the wall, no discipline behind it. We rebuilt the engineers themselves: Six Sigma through the whole staff, wired into onboarding so it stuck. The reliability followed, and everything else stood on it.
Two different failures, one method: find the root system that’s actually failing — machines, measurement, people, material — and fix that. The P&L follows.
The work
Diagnosis — the data and the floor, read together: where the process actually loses, versus where the reports say it does. Days to weeks, not months.
Root cause — named, evidenced, and separated from the theories. If the problem is upstream of the process — design, material, spec — you’ll hear that too.
Recovery plan — the sequence, the cost, and what “fixed” will measure like. A plan your team can run without me.
Capability rebuild — so it doesn’t come back: the statistical discipline, the process controls, and the training that make the fix permanent instead of heroic.
After the assessment
Most engagements end with the diagnosis and the plan — that’s the design. When you want it driven, I stay on: running the recovery alongside your team until the numbers hold.
A note on scope
This starts as a bounded diagnostic, not an open-ended operations role. If what you actually need is a fractional executive, I’ll tell you that in the first conversation — and whether it should be me is a separate discussion.