Accelerating Operations Performance
For manufacturers whose operation is not delivering what you planned.
Your operation can deliver more than it does today. Usually much more.
More output, more reliable delivery, lower costs, room to absorb growth: in almost every plant, the gap between what the operation does and what it could do is bigger than anyone thinks. Most of it can be closed without capital investment. We close it together with your own people, and in a way that holds once we have gone.
Delivery reliability
65% (at the start) → 85% (after phasing out) → 98% (six months later)
Two production sites in two countries, nine months. Grade-A output rose from 20% to 80% over the same period, and then, without us, to 90%. Read the case →
Do you recognise your operation here?
Demand is growing, output isn’t keeping up
Delivery dates slip, quality wobbles and overtime climbs, while the margin the extra volume should have brought never materialises. Nothing has got worse: the buffer that used to absorb the problems has been used up.
Costs have to come out, without breaking the operation
The obvious savings have been banked, and more is needed. Nobody can say with any evidence which costs actually carry the operation, so the cuts fall where resistance is lowest. And with them goes the capacity that was quietly holding everything together.
The plan isn’t being met
There is always something, and without anyone noticing, the schedule has become an estimate rather than a commitment. The shop floor isn’t ignoring the plan; it is working around a plan that never described the real week.
The operation can do more than it produces
The current level has been normal for so long that nobody remembers what the plant is capable of. The losses are spread across shifts, changeovers and short stops that each look small, and together add up to a different plant.
The answer lies in your own operation, not in a benchmark.
Beneath all four lies the same problem: nobody can say with certainty what this operation is really capable of. Short stops fall below the recording threshold, downtime codes are filled in from memory after the fact, and speed losses barely show up at all. Decisions are made on gut feel.
It isn’t an industry figure or a consultant’s model that shows what is possible, but your own best weeks.
The difference between your best week and your average week is extra capacity you already own. That isn’t theory: your own equipment and your own people have already delivered it. We make that difference visible together with the people who run the operation, so that they don’t just see it, they believe it.
Lasting improvement needs a different management system, different behaviours and shared ownership.
The first results usually come.
They just don’t stay. Usually, the improvement isn’t anchored in all three. Some programmes change the management system but leave behaviour untouched. Others work on behaviour while the way the operation is managed stays exactly as it was. And the solutions are often designed and rolled out by a project team or by consultants, without the people in the line feeling involved. Then shared ownership is missing. A programme like that runs for as long as management is paying attention. Over time that attention fades: the organisation slips back into its old habits, and the results erode slowly and unnoticed. On paper, the programme is often still running.
We work differently: we change the management system and behaviours together, and always with your people. Together with your people we capture the losses, and we help them see their own operation clearly and accept reality as it is. From there we develop the solutions and the management system together: the metrics, the meetings and the division of roles that hold the new level in place. That is how your people come to own what changes. Data, reporting and supporting technology are part of this, not a separate IT project.
We implement together too. Your people make the changes themselves; we coach in the workplace, in the moment: in meetings, on the shop floor, alongside the key roles. That way the new behaviours develop in the real work, within the new management system, with micro-training delivered at the point where it can be put straight into practice. And because every site does its own analysis, every site gets its own answers, not a copy of another plant’s.
We step back. The improvement doesn’t.
For us, embedding the results isn’t a phase at the end; it starts on day one. From the analysis onwards we build all three together with your people: the management system, the behaviours and the shared ownership. As the project elements move step by step into day-to-day practice and the improvements take hold, we scale back our support. We leave when your people can not only hold the result, but build on it themselves.
That is why we measure a third figure: where performance stands after we have left.
“At the start we were completely against the project. But we were wrong. We were all fully involved, and it genuinely helped us secure our future.“- Chair of the works council, metal packaging plant
Cases
Since 2006, improving performance together with the people who do the work
Axisto works with companies in discrete manufacturing and the process industries, at sites with roughly 200 to 3,000 employees: the whole company, or a single operation within a larger group. When a client rolls the approach out to other plants, we work across Europe.
Start with up to ten days at your site
Two of our people work on site with your own team, for a fixed price agreed in advance. You get a substantiated picture of what your operation can deliver, where the losses are, what they are worth and how much of that can be closed without capital investment. And an organisation that understands and accepts that picture.
Then you decide. Most clients ask us to continue; some do the work themselves. If you opt for implementation, we are prepared to link part of our fees to the result, because the baseline and the target have been agreed together beforehand.