From Diagnosis to Momentum: Building the Business Case and the Plan to Turn Around a Struggling UK Operation
Outcomes
Priority improvement opportunities were identified, quantified, and agreed with all stakeholders — providing the evidence base for investment in a structured improvement programme. A programme of work was shaped to tackle the operational shortcomings identified across production, logistics, technical, and commercial functions. Programme governance, joint team resourcing, and ways of working were defined to accelerate the pace of change. Management capability to implement and sustain change was assessed, with an implementation approach developed to deliver results while simultaneously addressing the capability gaps identified.
Background
The problems were structural and interlocking. Poor integration of two businesses had created operational inefficiencies that tough market conditions were making increasingly costly to sustain. The business was losing ground to competitors, carrying excess capacity against a high fixed cost base, and running broken planning processes that were driving excessive inventory levels. Production inefficiencies were compounding the cost pressure, and a history of poorly executed initiatives had left the management team without the confidence or capability to drive improvement themselves.
What the business needed was not another programme imposed from the outside, but an honest assessment of where it stood, a credible and agreed quantification of what improvement was achievable, and a plan that the management team could own and lead.
Curzon Approach
Curzon conducted a structured analysis of current production, logistics, technical, and commercial operations, designed to surface inefficiencies and articulate the improvement potential clearly and credibly. The diagnostic was not treated as an internal exercise: opportunities were quantified and the benefits agreed with all stakeholders before a single workstream was designed, ensuring that the programme that followed was built on a foundation of shared understanding rather than consultant-led assertion.
Assessing management capability to implement change was treated as a first-order priority alongside the operational analysis. In a business with a track record of poor initiative execution, understanding the people and capability dimension was as important as understanding the operational one. The implementation approach was designed to deliver early results while simultaneously beginning to address the capability challenges that had caused previous programmes to stall.
Enrolling the management team as leaders in the improvement programme rather than subjects of it was central to the design from the outset, reflecting Curzon’s experience that the difference between a programme that lands and one that fails is rarely the quality of the analysis.
CASE STUDIES
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From 50% Utilisation to a Doubling of Return on Sales: Creating Commercial Focus in a Technical Business
Outcomes
Staff utilisation rose steadily from around 60% to 74% and was still climbing at the close of the engagement. Return on Sales doubled as a result, and cash flow improved by 90%. The business exceeded its profit target for the financial year. Senior management adopted the Target Operating Model template as the basis for their annual planning and performance management framework, and staff surveys reported a more positive trend and a “general atmosphere of success.”
The Managing Director said: “Roke had previously been subject to a number of change programmes that had been imposed on the organisation. The key to Curzon’s success was their ability to work with the Roke Leadership Team and involve many members of staff in the design and implementation. At the core was a joint understanding of the need to develop a much more proactive culture of performance at the individual and business level. We now focus on our customers, internal as well as external.”
Background
In a good week, utilisation reached 60%. At its worst it fell below 50%. For a business whose revenue and profitability depended entirely on deploying skilled people against billable work, those numbers represented a fundamental structural problem. Most projects were overdue and over budget, and insufficient responsibility was being taken for budgets, customer engagement, delivery, and team performance across the organisation.
Previous change programmes had been imposed on the organisation rather than developed with it, and a resistance to change had taken root as a result. Any new initiative would need to overcome that legacy before it could begin to address the operational issues beneath it.
Curzon Approach
Curzon began with a root-and-branch business review, identifying opportunities to reduce direct costs and increase the deployment of billable staff simultaneously. The additional capacity unlocked would serve a dual purpose: clearing a backlog of overdue work and creating the headroom to win and deliver additional sales revenue within the year.
A Target Operating Model was designed covering processes, organisation, locations, information systems, suppliers, and management, giving the business a coherent blueprint for how it needed to operate rather than a piecemeal set of fixes. Resourcing control was centralised to make the allocation of people to work a more open, structured, and accountable process. Role-specific utilisation targets were modelled and set, establishing for the first time a clear performance expectation at the individual level. Sales and operations planning principles, drawn from manufacturing discipline, were introduced to bring the same rigour to white-collar working that the best operational businesses apply on the shop floor.
Throughout, the engagement was conducted with the organisation rather than done to it. Extensive communication at every level ensured the trust, input, and ownership that previous programmes had failed to achieve. The distinction mattered: where imposed change had repeatedly stalled, a co-designed transformation delivered results that senior management then adopted as the permanent framework for running the business.
CASE STUDIES
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Out-of-the-Box Procurement Thinking: £5.1m Saved Across 30 Spend Categories
Outcomes
The programme delivered £5.1 million in annualised cost savings across more than 30 spend categories spanning IT, HR, facilities management, professional services, fleet, telecoms, and operational expenditure. Over 80 ideas were generated across 20 workshops, with more than 80 key suppliers engaged throughout the process. Quick wins of over £0.5 million were delivered within the first few weeks, providing immediate momentum. The CEO said: “The Curzon team approached the complex task with energy and professionalism, which was key to the ultimate success of the programme. The technical knowledge and capability of the Curzon team were clear from the start of the engagement and we had total faith in their capability to deliver the ambitious goals they had been set. Marston would recommend Curzon to anyone who requires the domain knowledge and experience of a capable consulting partner.”
Background
Operating at significant scale across a complex, multi-division structure, the business had accumulated a fragmented and largely unoptimised procurement base. Spend categories had grown organically across divisions without the benefit of cross-business coordination, supplier rationalisation, or systematic commercial challenge. In an increasingly inflationary environment, the cost of inaction was rising, and the business needed a partner with the procurement expertise and commercial creativity to find savings that internal teams had not been able to unlock themselves.
Curzon Approach
Curzon moved at pace from the outset, conducting a rapid opportunity assessment to define the savings landscape before committing to a structured delivery plan. Rather than applying a single procurement lever, Curzon deployed six distinct approaches across the category portfolio, each selected for where it would have the greatest impact.
Quick win workshops engaged key suppliers rapidly to surface immediately implementable cost reduction ideas, delivering £0.5 million within the first few weeks and establishing the credibility of the programme early. Structured go-to-market and tendering activity was then applied to categories with the strongest competitive opportunity, using advanced negotiation techniques including e-Auctions across complex categories such as IT, temporary labour, and others.
Demand management and specification optimisation targeted the way the business purchased rather than simply who it purchased from, identifying opportunities across print, postage, penalty notice formats, and uniform specifications to reduce cost without reducing capability. Product harmonisation across all divisions standardised the uniform portfolio, simplifying the demand profile, improving supply continuity, and generating material savings through volume consolidation.
In one of the most innovative workstreams, Curzon worked in close collaboration with suppliers to implement a new consolidated IT device that replaced multiple individual devices, improving agent satisfaction and delivering substantial savings through specification innovation rather than price negotiation alone. A make-versus-buy assessment of services including recruitment identified opportunities to internalise or outsource selectively, with Curzon supporting through both the analysis and the implementation phase.
CASE STUDIES
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From Bespoke to Blueprint: Compressing a 19-Day Production Cycle to 10 and Saving £0.5m Per Cycle
Outcomes
Cycle time was compressed from a best-demonstrated performance of 19 days to a sustained average below the 14-day target, and as low as 10 days. Each cycle reduction generated associated cost savings of approximately £0.5 million, with savings accumulating across a programme that had previously been haemorrhaging cost through extended plant leases and repeated delays. The client noted that having Curzon embedded within the project proved highly effective, with pragmatic, tailored interventions and a test-and-learn approach that encouraged genuine adoption and ownership across the project team.
Background
Despite significant effort to find a workable engineering solution, the project had consistently failed to meet planned delivery cycle times. The best performance ever achieved was a 19-day cycle against a target of 14 days, and that level of performance was far from consistent. Non-recoverable costs were accruing rapidly through the extension of expensive marine engineering plant leases.
The delivery model itself was part of the problem. The project relied heavily on the experience of individual agents, managers, and foremen to manage communication and coordination, without the structure or formality needed to make performance repeatable. Each production cycle had effectively been bespoke, meaning lessons from one cycle were rarely carried forward to the next, and there was no standard process to return to when unplanned events caused deviation.
Curzon Approach
Curzon embedded directly within the project team rather than advising from the outside, a decision that proved critical in a technically complex and fast-moving marine environment where understanding the operational reality was a prerequisite for designing effective interventions.
Working alongside the project team, Curzon identified and implemented an optimal production process with defined task times, giving the project a consistent plan to execute against and measure performance for the first time. Cross-functional short-range planning disciplines were introduced to improve visibility across the operation and reduce the instances of unplanned stoppages caused by poor communication and lack of coordination between functions.
Communication cascades to front-line teams were strengthened to ensure the right plan was being executed at the point of delivery. A process improvement pipeline was prioritised to accelerate implementation of the highest-impact solutions first, and close monitoring was used to highlight avoidable downtime and drive operational fixes such as deck layout standardisation.
Critically, the concept of a standard process was established and maintained. When unplanned events caused deviation, the project now had an agreed sequence to course-correct back to rather than improvising a new approach from scratch. The shift from bespoke to repeatable was the foundation on which all of the cycle time improvements were built.
CASE STUDIES
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40% Less Inventory, 50% Faster: Redesigning an Aerospace Value Chain From the Ground Up
Outcomes
The engagement identified a 40% reduction in inventory through work-in-progress elimination across the value chain. A 50% reduction in production lead time was confirmed as feasible. Yield performance improved by 10 percentage points through closer process control, and a plan to deliver £5 million in in-year savings was agreed and put into motion. Lean workflow changes were implemented in pilot cells, a continuous improvement programme was launched across the shop floor, and new KPIs replaced the traditional cost absorption metrics that had been masking underperformance.
Background
Work-in-progress and finished goods inventories had accumulated to levels that were absorbing significant capital and masking the true performance of the operation. Production measures were actively encouraging over-production rather than flow, and process velocity through the multi-stage operation was extremely low, compounded by poor yields and excessive scrap.
A silo mentality across Operations was exacerbating the inventory problem, with functions optimising locally rather than managing the value chain as an integrated whole. The workforce had become disaffected and disengaged from improvement activity, and without effective performance management in place there was no mechanism to change that dynamic. The organisation was caught in a cycle where the metrics used to run the business were reinforcing the behaviours causing it to underperform.
Curzon Approach
Curzon structured the engagement in two connected phases: first, articulating the true operational improvement potential through rigorous current-state analysis; second, designing and piloting the interventions needed to realise it.
The current-state analysis established the business case for change in P&L and cash terms, giving leadership a clear and credible picture of the prize available before committing to a redesign programme. From this foundation, a pilot was designed to create an integrated supply chain for the highest-volume product, pulling in suppliers and joint venture partners to address the full end-to-end value chain rather than the internal operation in isolation.
A pull model was designed in detail, eliminating WIP stages along the entire supply chain to reduce inventory and accelerate flow. The physical layout and organisation of the operation were redesigned to separate dirty and clean processes, directly reducing the rework that had been inflating scrap rates and consuming capacity. Lean workflow approaches were introduced and trialled in pilot cells before broader rollout, reducing implementation risk and building the evidence base for scaling.
A cascaded performance management framework was designed and introduced to replace the cost absorption metrics that had been driving the wrong behaviours, giving the operation a set of KPIs genuinely oriented around value chain performance. A programme of Lean training and continuous improvement projects was implemented to build the shop floor capability and engagement that sustained improvement requires.
CASE STUDIES
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Restructured for Growth: £4.1m in Savings and a Scalable Operating Model for a Major Waste Division
Outcomes
The redesign delivered projected annualised cost savings of £4.1 million, phased across three implementation stages, with immediate savings of £0.6 to £0.8 million expected in the first quarter following initial changes. The Sales function was realigned to customer needs and geographic segments, sharpening focus on high-value customers. Customer Service was streamlined through improved processes and reduced complaint volumes. The division emerged from the programme with a flexible, scalable operating model positioned for future growth rather than burdened by the legacy of past acquisitions.
Background
The challenges were structural and interconnected. Duplication of functions and overlapping roles were raising costs and creating inefficiencies that showed up in day-to-day ways of working. The absence of standardised, clearly defined roles hampered operational agility and made consistent performance difficult to achieve across the division. Inconsistent operating practices were beginning to affect customer experience, while revenue accountability was misaligned, sitting within Operations rather than Sales, creating confusion about where commercial ownership resided.
The division needed more than a cost reduction exercise. It needed a coherent redesign that would eliminate duplication, clarify accountability, and build the structural foundations for sustainable growth.
Curzon Approach
Curzon worked with divisional leadership across the full scope of the redesign, developing a structured set of initiatives that addressed the cost base and the operating model simultaneously rather than treating them as separate problems.
The organisational structure was redesigned to eliminate duplication and establish clear roles and responsibilities across the division. The Sales function was restructured under a unified strategy, with revenue accountability shifted from Operations to Sales to bring commercial ownership in line with commercial activity. Administrative tasks within Sales were centralised to reduce inefficiencies and free up the sales force to focus on customer-facing activity.
Customer Service was streamlined through a combination of process improvement and complaint volume reduction, reducing the headcount required without compromising service quality. New roles focused on operational excellence, route planning efficiency, and fleet utilisation were introduced to strengthen the operational core of the division.
Throughout, a phased implementation approach was developed to sequence the changes in a way that minimised disruption to the business while delivering early savings that would build momentum and demonstrate progress to the Board. The result was a division structurally reset for the next phase of its growth, with the clarity, accountability, and scalability it had previously lacked.
CASE STUDIES
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From Worst to Exemplar: A €50m Profit Turnaround at Europe's Largest Automotive Glass Producer
Outcomes
The engagement delivered a profit turnaround of approximately €50 million over three years, transforming the site from persistent underperformer to one of the top performers within the group. Overall Equipment Effectiveness improved by 40% without any additional capital expenditure. Working capital was reduced by 25% on a sustained basis, even as demand increased. Line changeover times were cut from seven hours to three. The site was established as a group-wide exemplar of best operating practices, re-establishing its position as a market-leading producer.
The engagement was recognised as Best International Project by the UK Management Consultancies Association. The Divisional CEO said: “We wanted a step change in performance, done in a way that would build capability to make it sustainable. The results speak for themselves.”
Background
The scale of the challenge was matched by its complexity. Poor asset management and maintenance routines were causing significant unplanned downtime, while capital expenditure requests were being made without the performance data needed to justify or prioritise them. There was no effective performance management framework in place, resulting in low and inconsistent productivity across both plant and people. Planning processes were inefficient and uncoordinated, leaving working capital inflated and stock poorly controlled.
Beneath the operational issues lay a cultural challenge that had defeated every previous intervention: a workforce and management community that had learned to accept underperformance as the norm, and that had grown resistant to the kind of change the site urgently needed. Any solution would need to address both dimensions simultaneously.
Curzon Approach
Curzon began with a comprehensive baseline performance analysis to establish the true starting point and identify the improvement levers that would form the foundation of a credible business case. This diagnostic rigour was essential in an environment where previous attempts had failed partly because the problem had never been fully understood before solutions were imposed.
A joint team was created with the client from the outset, maximising knowledge transfer and building ownership of solutions among the people who would be responsible for sustaining them. Rather than managing the transformation from the outside, Curzon worked embedded within the operation, focusing on the critical few KPIs that would unlock the most significant performance and profitability gains.
OEE was identified as the primary lever. Lean performance tools including Short Interval Control and SMED were applied, with a deliberate focus on first-line leadership as the key to driving lasting behaviour change on the shop floor. Line changeover processes were systematically redesigned, cutting standard times from seven hours to three and releasing latent capacity without the need for additional capital investment.
Improvements were piloted first, demonstrating impact before committing to site-wide rollout, and a repeatable blueprint and playbook were developed to enable scaling both across the site and to other locations within the group. A capital programme review identified where expenditure could be deferred as efficiency gains met capacity needs, removing cost from the investment plan while the operation was still in recovery.
A varied and thorough communication programme ran throughout, engaging the whole workforce in the transformation rather than managing change from above. This investment in hearts and minds was not peripheral to the programme; it was what made the difference in an environment where resistance had previously proven insurmountable.
CASE STUDIES
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Making Digital Real: Bringing Commercial Clarity to a Global Engineering Firm's Digital Ambition
Outcomes
The engagement delivered a materially improved understanding of digital commercial models across the regional leadership team, broadening solution owners’ perspectives on the revenue potential of their individual initiatives. Five initial priorities for commercialisation were agreed from a portfolio of twelve solutions under development, providing the focus the business needed to move from incubation to market. Key gaps in understanding were identified and defined, including the detailed business cases and operating model definition needed to support the agreed priorities, with clear next steps established for governance and roadmap development.
Background
Twelve digital solutions were under incubation across the business, but the organisation lacked the commercial framework needed to prioritise, sequence, and bring them to market effectively. The threats and opportunities of digitisation were understood at a strategic level, but the regional leadership team had not yet developed a shared, grounded understanding of how digital business models actually work or how comparable organisations had successfully monetised digital services.
Without that foundation, even well-designed digital solutions risked failing to reach their commercial potential. The gap between innovation and revenue was real, and closing it required both a change in thinking at leadership level and a clear set of commercial priorities to act on.
Curzon Approach
Curzon designed and delivered a leadership workshop to bring digital commercial reality to life for the regional leadership team. Rather than presenting abstract strategy, the session drew on case studies of successful technology companies to illustrate how digital business models actually work and how services are monetised in practice. Traditional and emerging competitor examples grounded the discussion in the client’s own market context.
In parallel, Curzon developed a set of solution canvasses summarising key information and observations across each of the twelve digital solutions currently under development, giving the business a consistent, comparable view of its innovation portfolio for the first time. The twelve solutions were then analysed against four dimensions: potential revenue size, relevance across business lines and service lines, geographic applicability across the region, and stage of development. From this, an initial set of five priorities for commercialisation was proposed and agreed, giving the organisation a clear and defensible starting point for its go-to-market effort.
The engagement closed with an honest identification of the remaining gaps: the detailed business cases still needed, the operating model for monetisation still to be defined, and the governance and roadmap processes required to take the priorities forward. Clarity about what remained to be done was as valuable an output as the decisions already made.
CASE STUDIES
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Fit for Purpose, Built to Last: Redesigning the Process Foundation of a Fast-Scaling Nuclear Programme
Outcomes
The redesigned processes delivered transformative improvements across the programme. Workflows were tailored to the specific needs of the nuclear development context while aligning fully with project and programme management best practice. Operations became genuinely integrated across business functions and complementary workstreams, eliminating the fragmentation that had previously impeded delivery. A bespoke project classification tool provided project-specific process flows while preserving the flexibility needed for a diverse portfolio. Critically, critical investors in the programme gained materially greater confidence in the organisation’s ability to manage complex projects and programmes at scale.
Background
The processes in place had not been built for this organisation or this context. Inherited from a parent company, they were misaligned with the specific demands of nuclear power development, leading to disconnected workflows, duplication of effort, and bottlenecks in governance and decision-making that an internal audit had formally identified as critical deficiencies.
The consequences were felt both internally and externally. Project execution was impeded, resources were being strained by workarounds and inefficiencies, and stakeholder confidence was being undermined at precisely the moment when the programme needed to be demonstrating delivery credibility to its most critical investors. A rapid response to the audit findings was needed in parallel with a more fundamental rethinking of the entire process landscape.
Curzon Approach
Curzon structured the engagement to address both the immediate and the strategic simultaneously. Urgent audit actions were turned around rapidly, bringing the most critical process gaps into alignment without waiting for the broader redesign to be completed. This parallel-track approach ensured the organisation was not left exposed while the longer-term work progressed.
The process redesign itself began with a comprehensive analysis and benchmarking of the existing process landscape against industry best practice, combined with a detailed maturity evaluation to identify the specific gaps and priorities that would define the redesign agenda. Value stream mapping workshops with over 50 stakeholders captured the current-state picture across both internal and customer-facing processes, surfacing the inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and non-value-adding activities that the redesign needed to eliminate.
A future-state process landscape was then defined and validated through targeted workshops and engagements with senior decision-makers and key end-users, ensuring that the redesigned processes reflected the practical realities of the people who would operate them, not just the preferences of those who commissioned them. Redesigned and agreed procedures were documented and issued through a streamlined governance and change control process managed end-to-end by Curzon.
To maximise the value of the new processes for end-users, a bespoke project classification tool was developed and implemented, enabling tailored process flows for each project type while maintaining a unified, governance-consistent framework across the portfolio.
CASE STUDIES
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£18.1m in Efficiencies Identified: A Full Organisational Review That Cut Complexity and Restored Accountability
Outcomes
The review identified a total cost efficiency opportunity of £18.1m, representing 10% of the addressable people cost base. This comprised £15.7m through targeted functional improvements and a further £2.4m through macro structural change. Quick wins of £5.7m were identified as achievable within three months, with the full opportunity accessible over a nine to twelve month horizon. The findings formed the foundation of a Blueprint for Change and clear decision pathways to support executive alignment and implementation.
Background
The operating model had developed organically rather than by design. Support and project functions had grown disproportionately relative to revenue, spans and layers were unbalanced, and many roles lacked clear accountability. Duplicated roles, legacy positions, and shadow activities had accumulated over time, adding complexity and cost without adding value.
There was no structural clarity across the Group and Divisional functions, and uncontrolled cost growth had gone unchallenged. The organisation needed an honest, evidence-based assessment of where it stood, and a credible set of options for what to do about it.
Curzon Approach
Curzon conducted a comprehensive organisational review across three core business blocks, grounded in desktop analysis of HR data and financial budgets aligned to a live workforce snapshot. Rather than applying a single efficiency lens, four distinct levers were deployed across the analysis: Stop, Optimise, Do Cheaper, and Automate. This framework ensured that every efficiency opportunity was categorised by the nature of the intervention required, not simply its financial size, giving the executive team a nuanced and actionable picture rather than a flat list of cuts.
Macro structural alternatives were evaluated alongside targeted functional improvements, including a higher-ambition scenario designed to align the organisation more fully with its strategic priorities and future ownership plans. Each initiative was then prioritised for implementation across a three to twelve month horizon, assessed against risk, disruption, and return to ensure sequencing was practical and defensible.
The output was not a report but a Blueprint for Change: a structured set of findings, prioritised initiatives, and decision pathways designed to give executive leadership the clarity and confidence to act.