Stuart Kitching

Curzon applied a comprehensive, fact-based diagnostic across the full breadth of the business — examining product, people, customers, regulation, operations, and supply chain through the Curzon framework. This wide-angle view was essential: footprint decisions of this complexity cannot be made on cost data alone, and understanding the regulatory, commercial, and capability dimensions was as important as the financial analysis.

From this foundation, an options-based operating model was developed to serve as an anchor for scenario evaluation across three primary lenses — providing a structured way to compare meaningfully different futures rather than iterating around a single assumed solution. Each principal scenario was evaluated interactively with key stakeholders from across the business — a deliberate choice to build ownership and test practical feasibility in parallel, rather than presenting conclusions after the fact.

Priority options were then subjected to extensive financial assessment, conducted in close cooperation with the client’s own finance function to ensure the numbers were grounded in the business’s actual cost structure and validated by those who would be held accountable for delivering them. The resulting recommendation balanced profitability, operational resilience, and the commercial imperative of meeting in-country sourcing requirements — structured as a self-funding investment to make implementation as straightforward as possible to sanction.

Throughout, the people dimension was treated as a first-order concern rather than an implementation afterthought — ensuring that the path to a rationalised footprint was one the organisation could walk without losing what made it valuable.

Curzon conducted a structured gap analysis, assessing current ways of working against best-in-class practice across people, process, and systems dimensions. Stakeholder interviews were central to the approach — allowing us to surface not just the technical picture, but the lived experience of the organisation: where the real points of pain were, and where people could see opportunities that hadn’t yet been acted on.

This was complemented by analysis of key internal and external documentation, and focused desktop research into the software and data governance landscape — ensuring our recommendations were grounded in both the client’s specific context and the broader market of available solutions.

Options for future ways of working were defined and assessed against a three-layer operating model framework, covering people, process, and technology. From this, a prioritised set of recommendations was developed — giving the organisation a clear, sequenced path forward rather than an undifferentiated list of possibilities.

The result was stakeholder alignment that had previously been absent: a shared understanding of where the organisation stood, where it needed to get to, and how to get there — with the regulatory context fully integrated into the thinking.

Curzon applied a systematic review framework — examining the programme across four critical dimensions: vision, governance, approach, and benefits case. This structured lens allowed us to quickly identify where the fundamental weaknesses lay, rather than treating the symptoms in isolation.

The absence of a clear, shared vision emerged as the central issue. Without it, there was no common understanding of what the programme was trying to achieve or why it mattered — and no basis for the stakeholder buy-in that regional adoption required. Curzon worked to articulate a compelling vision and translate it into a governance structure and set of design principles that gave the programme a coherent identity and clear lines of accountability.

Testing adoption levels across the organisation and with key stakeholders gave us an honest picture of where engagement was genuine and where it was superficial — informing a realistic assessment of what the programme could credibly deliver and over what timeframe. A financial narrative was constructed and stress-tested, grounding the benefits case in numbers that the organisation could recognise and own.

The output was a reframed programme — with early wins identified, a delivery timeline validated, and executive alignment secured around a set of ambitions that were both meaningful and achievable.

Curzon began with a rigorous operational analysis — establishing precisely where, why, and how greater efficiencies were achievable across the site. This diagnostic foundation ensured that the transformation effort was targeted at the interventions with the greatest impact, rather than spread thinly across the operation.

A transformation pilot was designed and managed by Curzon, with effectiveness carefully measured before committing to a wider rollout — a disciplined approach that built confidence in the changes and reduced the risk of implementation. The rollout was then prioritised and executed with robust project governance, supported by structured training to embed new ways of working across the operation.

Running alongside the operational changes was a focused effort to build leadership capability within the local management team — working with managers directly to develop the skills and confidence needed to sustain the transformation independently. This capability transfer was not an afterthought; it was central to the design of the programme from the outset, and it is what made the improvements durable rather than dependent on continued external support.

Curzon’s approach was comprehensive and hands-on — working directly alongside the management team rather than from the outside, and involving the full leadership group in designing and owning the transformation from the outset.

A cross-functional planning process was implemented to create, for the first time, a coherent and shared view of demand, delivery priorities, and the factory’s real capacity to deliver against them. With that foundation in place, Curzon worked alongside management to establish control across Production, Purchasing, Planning, and Inventory Management — four functions that had previously operated without adequate coordination or accountability.

Lean capabilities were introduced on the shop floor, improving productivity while simultaneously building a culture of ownership among the workforce. Commercial management was strengthened to ensure revenues were being effectively captured and operational costs actively managed. Capital investment in facilities — already sanctioned — was aligned with the operational reorganisation to maximise its impact.

The transformation was designed to be owned by the site’s own people, not sustained by external support — and the results reflected that: a workforce that understood what was required of them, a management team with the tools and disciplines to maintain performance, and a site that had moved from an organisational liability to one of the group’s flagship operations.

Curzon’s first task was to accurately diagnose what had gone wrong — and to resist the temptation to simply accelerate a methodology that wasn’t working. Our assessment concluded that Agile, while theoretically appropriate, was not suited to the organisation’s current capabilities and ways of working. We recommended a deliberate shift to a traditional Waterfall approach — a pragmatic call that prioritised delivery over methodology orthodoxy, and one that immediately created the structure needed to start clearing the backlog.

With the delivery approach reset, Curzon turned to the backlog itself — analysing it systematically to identify quick wins that could be delivered rapidly and visibly, and defining which items needed to be prioritised to get the programme back on track. Alongside this, we worked to rebuild the team’s capability through targeted, structured hiring aligned to the Data Strategy target operating model.

Equally important was the reputational dimension. Curzon ensured that the Data team’s progress and achievements were made directly visible to senior leaders — giving the C-suite genuine line-of-sight into the recovery effort and rapidly rebuilding the trust and credibility that had been lost. By making the team accountable to leadership in a transparent and structured way, we turned visibility from a risk into an asset.

Curzon structured the engagement in two phases, recognising that meaningful progress on resilience measurement was only possible once a shared understanding of the concept itself had been established.

Phase one focused on reaching that common understanding — mapping the range of approaches to resilience that existed across the airport’s various departments, and working with stakeholders to develop a single, consistent definition that could serve as the foundation for everything that followed. This was not a semantic exercise: without alignment on what resilience meant, any attempt to measure or improve it would be undermined by competing assumptions.

Phase two translated that definition into practical tools and criteria. Curzon defined eight resilience principles applicable across any of the airport’s operational systems, providing a structured lens through which both current operations and future growth options could be assessed. A purpose-built assessment tool was then developed to enable the airport’s strategic planning teams to evaluate expansion scenarios against these principles — bringing objectivity and rigour to decisions that would otherwise have been made without a consistent framework for resilience.

Curzon began by establishing the size of the prize — quantifying the addressable improvement potential across the site using an 80/20 approach to focus effort where it would have the greatest impact. This gave the client a clear, evidence-based view of what was achievable and formed the basis of a structured implementation plan.

A unified maintenance spares planning process was developed and implemented across the site — replacing the patchwork of individual practices with a single, coherent methodology. Critically, this process differentiated between planned and unplanned maintenance articles, allowing stock levels to be set with genuine precision rather than as a blunt hedge against uncertainty.

To manage the risk of site-wide rollout, Curzon piloted the new processes and management approach in two units first — validating the methodology and refining it before scaling. KPIs were defined and implemented to give operational units the visibility and accountability they had previously lacked, and a centralised planning function was established for freely available articles used across multiple plants.

Underpinning all of this was a shift from reactive order processing to proactive inventory management — embedding a continuous improvement mindset that would sustain the gains beyond the life of the project itself.

Curzon was brought in to make an independent assessment of the project’s status, identify the causes of delay, and develop a plan and benefit case for the recommended way forward. We conducted approximately 20 diagnostic interviews across the full breadth of the organisation — including the client-facing team, purchasing, supply chain and logistics, finance, and a representative from the largest customer site — as well as the potential outsource partner itself. This was complemented by a thorough review of existing documentation and detailed analysis of purchasing and transaction data across 11,000 part numbers and five years of historic demand.

The findings led Curzon to a conclusion that directly challenged the client’s prevailing direction of travel: given the defence context, the nature of the processes, the organisational maturity of the client, and the lack of forward demand visibility, outsourcing was not the right solution. We presented that assessment clearly and on its merits — and management accepted it.

With the outsourcing path set aside, Curzon developed an alternative set of interventions to address the underlying performance issues: improving supplier OTIF through tighter schedule adherence and lead time compression; aggregating demand to unlock contractual price breaks; rationalising the supplier base; and reducing transactional volume and cost through order aggregation and automation.

Curzon applied a structured, fact-based diagnostic across the full breadth of the business — examining product, people, customers, regulation, operations, and supply chain through the Curzon framework. This comprehensive view of the organisation provided the solid foundation needed to develop a credible set of options rather than defaulting to an obvious but potentially suboptimal solution.

From the diagnostic, we developed an options-based operating model to serve as an anchor point for scenario evaluation across three primary lenses. Rather than presenting a recommendation and seeking sign-off, we worked interactively with key stakeholders from across the business — testing the practical feasibility of each scenario and building the ownership that would be essential for successful implementation.

Priority options were then subject to extensive assessment, including a detailed financial evaluation conducted in close cooperation with the client’s finance function, to identify the configuration that best balanced profitability with the ability to capture future market opportunities. The resulting recommendation was not only financially robust — it was structured to be self-funding, with a clear two-year payback that removed the need for external capital commitment.