Turning Stock Into Cash: Delivering Sustainable Inventory Reduction Across a Complex Industrial Site
Outcomes
The engagement delivered clearly defined and quantified improvement potentials for each operational unit across the site — with benefit realisation targets and KPIs established to underpin accountability going forward. A new, differentiated planning methodology was implemented, enabling inventory levels for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance articles to be managed separately for the first time — directly reducing stock levels. The central stores function was strengthened to enable more proactive, effective management of common parts across the site. With the project ongoing at the time of writing, the expected fee payback for the client was 10 to 1 within twelve months.
Background
Inventory had been growing steadily, but the underlying causes had never been properly diagnosed. Across more than ten operational units on the site, material planners were each working to their own individual practices — with no unified process, no shared methodology, and no common set of KPIs to manage performance against. Accountability for inventory levels was effectively absent.
Compounding this was a lack of differentiation between planning for articles used in planned maintenance versus unplanned maintenance — a distinction that matters significantly for determining appropriate stock levels, and whose absence was contributing directly to inflated inventory across the site. The result was working capital tied up in stock that, in many cases, the business could not properly account for or justify.
Curzon Approach
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.
CASE STUDIES
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Challenging the Outsourcing Assumption: How Independent Challenge Unlocked a Better Path Forward
Outcomes
Curzon’s independent assessment led to a fundamental reversal of the client’s planned outsourcing strategy — a recommendation accepted by management on the strength of the evidence presented. This freed up a team of internal staff who had been working on the outsourcing project for over a year, redirecting their capacity to higher-value work. Performance improvements delivered in parallel were equally significant: supplier OTIF rose to 85% against a target of 95%, demand aggregation pilots demonstrated price savings of 30–50%, lead times were compressed from 150 to 117 days with a clear roadmap to 50, and transactional costs were reduced by £1,250 per item. The quality of the work led the client to retain Curzon beyond the original engagement to continue supporting their supply chain initiatives.
Background
The supply chain operation was under pressure on multiple fronts. The improvement programme intended to address its performance issues was significantly behind schedule, eroding internal confidence in the organisation’s ability to turn things around itself. The supply base was highly fragmented and siloed, with cost inefficiencies driven by supplier proliferation and a lack of effective controls. Existing tools and capabilities were not being leveraged to their potential, and visibility of forward demand was limited.
Against this backdrop, outsourcing order and inventory management to a third-party provider had emerged as the preferred path — and a considerable amount of internal resource had already been committed to making it happen.
Curzon Approach
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.
CASE STUDIES
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Rationalising a Six-Site Footprint Into a Self-Funding, Customer-Ready Operation
Outcomes
The recommended footprint optimisation was accepted in full — a self-funding capital investment with a two-year payback period. The new operations and supply chain configuration met customers’ requirements for in-country sourcing, directly protecting and enabling future contract growth. Implementation was designed to minimise disruption through a people-centred approach, reducing HR-related risk and ensuring the retention of critical capabilities. Crucially, key stakeholders across all principal sites were engaged and aligned throughout — giving the new model genuine organisational ownership from day one.
Background
The business had grown organically over time, accumulating a complex web of intra-company and external supply chain relationships spread across multiple sites. The result was slow production cycle times, an unwieldy planning process, and a cost base that made it difficult to price competitively for either retention or new business.
The absence of a clear make-or-buy policy meant that costly in-house production was being maintained in areas where external sourcing would have been both cheaper and more flexible. And with customers beginning to impose requirements for in-country sourcing, the existing multi-continent footprint risked becoming not just inefficient, but a barrier to winning future contracts altogether.
Curzon Approach
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.
CASE STUDIES
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From Fragmented Spend to £10m Saved: Rebuilding Procurement From the Ground Up
Outcomes
The engagement delivered £8 million in in-year cash savings against an original target of £13.5 million — with an exit run rate of £10 million per annum, providing a sustainable platform for ongoing benefit. A new procurement and supply chain operating model was fully installed and operational by the end of the programme, with all benefits fully traceable within business unit P&Ls — giving the organisation the transparency and accountability it had previously lacked.
Background
Despite the scale of its procurement spend, the business had no single, consolidated picture of what it was buying, from whom, or at what cost relative to the external market. Spend data was fragmented across business units, making it impossible to leverage the collective purchasing power of the organisation or to hold performance to account against any meaningful benchmark.
Previous procurement improvement efforts had already been factored into business unit budgets — meaning the bar for this engagement was set not at delivering savings in principle, but at delivering hard cash in the current financial year. The stretch target was unambiguous, and there was little room for the kind of multi-year programme that procurement transformations typically require.
Curzon Approach
Curzon began by creating a definitive spend cube — consolidating fragmented data into a single, authoritative picture of procurement spend across the business. This was the essential foundation: without it, there was no way to identify where the real opportunities lay or to build a credible case for action.
With a single set of numbers agreed, we conducted both a top-down and bottom-up analysis of spend at the detailed category and supplier level — identifying impactable spend and prioritising opportunities by size, speed, and deliverability. A structured implementation plan was developed and executed, with benefits closely monitored and recorded as they were realised to ensure traceability directly into business unit P&Ls.
In parallel, Curzon redesigned the procurement and supply chain organisation — bringing in the necessary skills and expertise to ensure the new operating model was not only installed but capable of sustaining the gains independently. The focus throughout was on in-year delivery: every workstream was sequenced and resourced to ensure that savings were cash-realisable within the financial year, not deferred to future periods.
CASE STUDIES
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From Fragmented to Future-Ready: Bringing Order to a National Infrastructure Organisation's Document Management
Outcomes
Curzon delivered a comprehensive view of current ways of working across three lenses — people, process, and systems — and achieved genuine alignment among key stakeholders on both the current state and the business requirements for the future. The engagement shed light on the regulatory context and its implications, provided clear recommended options for the future operating model, and set out immediate next steps — giving the organisation the clarity and momentum it needed to move forward with confidence.
Background
A historic absence of standardisation had left the organisation with a fragmented and inconsistent approach to document management. Multiple systems and practices had evolved independently across different teams, creating siloed working patterns and a lack of cohesion that made collaboration harder than it needed to be. Critically, no one had a comprehensive view of what solutions were actually in use across the business — let alone which of them were most appropriate.
The absence of clear business requirements definitions meant that even well-intentioned improvement efforts lacked a firm foundation. And with regulatory implications around document management adding a degree of urgency, the organisation needed to move beyond diagnosis and into action.
Curzon Approach
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.
CASE STUDIES
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Untangling the Black Box: Bringing Control and Clarity to a Fragile Costing Process
Outcomes
Within a ten-week engagement, Curzon delivered a complete end-to-end plan for costing data remediation, a clearly defined optimised target state, and a set of immediately actionable IT recommendations to establish a robust, controlled costing process. Critically, the project also surfaced and addressed a significant margin risk — identifying where sales giveaways were eroding profitability due to flawed cost calculations — and designed a solution to protect against it going forward.
Background
The business’s entire costing process had come to rest on a foundation of Excel — manual, uncontrolled, and opaque. There were no system-level safeguards, no transparency across the end-to-end process, and no single person or team with a complete picture of how costs were actually calculated. Knowledge was deeply siloed: individuals understood their own piece of the process well, but had little visibility of how it connected to the whole.
The consequences were significant. Errors and inconsistencies in the costing process were translating directly into margin erosion, with sales teams inadvertently giving away value that the business couldn’t see or quantify. The risks were real, but because the process had never been mapped end-to-end, they had never been properly understood.
Curzon Approach
Curzon moved quickly — mapping the current-state process in full within the first two weeks of a ten-week engagement. To do this effectively in an environment of siloed expertise, we deliberately sequenced our stakeholder engagement: speaking to individuals first, then bringing people together in groups, and finally convening a cross-functional workshop to ensure knowledge was surfaced, shared, and validated across the business rather than remaining locked in separate pockets.
With the as-is process fully documented, we developed a recommended target state — building on planned IT investment already in the pipeline to design an optimised, automated process that would remove the manual fragility at the heart of the current approach. We then worked up a detailed data cleanup plan, scoping the effort required to bring the underlying cost data up to the standard the new process would require.
Throughout, we kept the focus on what mattered most — in a project where unforeseen complexity surfaced regularly, disciplined triage ensured that effort was directed at the risks with the greatest commercial impact. Real product examples were used to make the problems tangible and communicable to stakeholders at every level, building the shared understanding needed to drive genuine buy-in to the recommendations.
CASE STUDIES
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Cutting Costs Without Cutting Corners: A 13% Labour Reduction With Zero Impact on Service
Outcomes
Within four months, the engagement delivered a £983,000 reduction in labour costs — a 13% saving — without any deterioration in customer service levels. Assembly area efficiency improved by 20% over the same period. Beyond the numbers, the work established a lasting shift in culture: a shop floor team newly empowered to identify problems, drive improvements, and hold themselves accountable to meaningful performance targets.
Background
The consolidation of two manufacturing sites had left the business with a fragmented production environment. Different working cultures, misaligned processes, and a poor production layout were the visible symptoms of a merger that had not been fully integrated. Previous improvement initiatives — including 5S and SMED programmes — had been poorly implemented and had failed to take hold.
The result was a shop floor that lacked the basics: roles and responsibilities were unclear, process compliance was inconsistent, quality and production targets were being missed, and where performance data was captured at all, there was little discipline around acting on it. The cost base had grown out of proportion with the value the operation was delivering.
Curzon Approach
Curzon’s focus was on getting back to basics — quickly and practically. Rather than layering in additional complexity, we worked to establish the fundamental disciplines that the operation was missing and build the habit of continuous improvement from the shop floor up.
Action-oriented PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) meetings were introduced to give shop floor teams a structured, regular rhythm for identifying issues and driving improvements themselves. The right performance KPIs were defined and embedded, with both short and long-term action plans developed to give teams clarity on what they were working towards and how progress would be measured.
Roles and responsibilities were clarified and agreed across the operation, removing the ambiguity that had allowed underperformance to persist. Middle management activity was structured through Daily Management Audits — creating visible accountability and ensuring that performance conversations happened consistently, at the right level, every day.
The changes were designed to be owned by the client, not dependent on Curzon’s continued presence — and the improvement in culture was as significant an outcome as the cost savings themselves.
CASE STUDIES
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From Eroding Margins to £4.7m Gained: Embedding Transformation at the Heart of the Business
Outcomes
Curzon delivered £4.7 million in annualised, repeatable EBITDA benefits within the first year of the programme — exceeding the original budget target of £2.9 million by over £1.8 million. Benefits were realised across Sales, Supply Chain Operations, Precision Pricing, and Support Functions. A further £4 million in EBITDA was preserved through proactive margin protection and the prevention of price erosion — identified by Curzon as an additional workstream during delivery. By the end of the engagement, the client had a newly established in-house Data function and the internal foundations to sustain transformation independently.
Background
The business was under real pressure. Market share was slipping, margins were being eroded, and the organisation lacked the internal infrastructure to coordinate and deliver the scale of transformation it needed. Sales performance was falling short, pricing practices were suboptimal, and there was no dedicated data capability to underpin better commercial decision-making.
The challenge was not simply one of identifying what needed to change — it was one of building the capacity to change it, at pace, across multiple functions simultaneously, while continuing to run the business.
Curzon Approach
Curzon was engaged to build and run a cross-functional Transformation Office from the ground up — acting as chair of an integrated team spanning Sales, Supply Chain, Operations, Finance, Technology, Data, People & Culture, and E-commerce. This was not an advisory role conducted from a distance: Curzon worked on-site, meeting with C-suite executives weekly and maintaining a consistent, transparent dialogue with senior leadership throughout.
When challenges emerged — as they inevitably do in complex transformation programmes — Curzon responded with honesty and decisive action rather than optimism. When Sales transformation benefits lagged behind plan, we reorganised the sales function, refocused resources on customer win-back and cross-sell strategies, and rebased the plan on realistic foundations. When pricing initiatives underdelivered, we initiated a full review of the pricing framework and supported the hiring of specialist resource to manage new pricing tools.
Curzon also looked beyond the original brief — identifying additional workstreams in cost management and pricing that ultimately preserved a further £4 million in EBITDA. Building the client’s own Data function ensured the gains made during the programme would be owned, maintained, and built upon long after Curzon’s involvement ended.
CASE STUDIES
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Business Transformation and Complete Turnaround of a Poor Performing Manufacturing Company
Outcomes
the turnaround delivered results that were, by the client’s own admission, remarkable. Delivery performance leapt from 14% to a sustained average of 92% to order. Raw material and work-in-progress inventory was reduced by approximately £5 million. Sales revenue recovered a 20% deficit against budget, and sales margin recovered a 25% deficit. Customer confidence was restored and senior management credibility rebuilt — all within twelve months.
The client’s VP of Operations said:
“All the transformation that happened in the last 12 months would not have been possible without Curzon support.” The Head of Group Manufacturing added: “This is the best example of a site transformation and progress on the Journey to Process Excellence that I have come across — and to do all this in 12 months is truly remarkable.”
Background
The site had lost the confidence of its customers entirely. Delivery performance to order stood at just 14% — a figure that had eroded trust at every level of the supply chain and damaged the credibility of site leadership. A £5 million capital refurbishment programme had been sanctioned, but bricks and mortar alone could not fix what was fundamentally an operational and cultural problem.
The issues ran deep. There was no clear understanding of supply capability relative to demand, material availability was unreliable, and relationships with internal suppliers had broken down. Inventory was out of control. The ERP system — a tool that should have been central to operational management — was poorly implemented and barely used, leading to a proliferation of workarounds on the shop floor. Perhaps most telling of all was the cultural dynamic: a workforce and management team that had learned to accept poor performance as the norm, without question or challenge.
Curzon Approach
Curzon’s approach combined immediate operational intervention with the longer-term capability building needed to make the improvements stick. Working directly on the shop floor and alongside management, we implemented the foundational disciplines that the site was missing.
A Sales & Operations Planning process was introduced to bring demand validation and supply commitment into alignment for the first time. Visual planning boards gave the shop floor a live, shared view of the plan and progress against it. Daily performance and discipline routines — supported by visual management — restored accountability at every level. Warehouse and inventory management routines brought stock under control, while a sustained effort to improve data quality and ERP usage eliminated the workarounds that had become embedded in daily practice.
Running in parallel with these operational changes was a structured programme of management and staff coaching — building the functional capabilities needed to sustain the transformation beyond Curzon’s involvement. A business management system and KPI framework were embedded to ensure ongoing performance visibility and a culture of continuous improvement.
CASE STUDIES
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Product Launch & Market Entry
Outcomes
Curzon delivered a comprehensive 10-year modernisation plan, providing the client with two major strategic options and four enhancement proposals for evaluation — each appraised through both a financial and a people-centred lens. The analysis included a best-estimate capital requirement of approximately £4 billion over the decade, a clear demonstration of the deteriorating trajectory of the estate if action was delayed, and a detailed sentiment analysis mapping where senior stakeholders aligned and — critically — where they diverged. The findings gave the client the evidence base it needed to take hard choices forward into a formal Business Case exercise.
Background
The training estate had become a significant liability. Ageing facilities were maintenance-intensive, operationally suboptimal, and in many cases no longer suited to the training requirements they were built to support. The cost and complexity of maintaining the existing footprint was accelerating, yet the path forward was far from straightforward — the estate carried deep institutional significance, and any rationalisation would need to navigate a large and diverse community of senior stakeholders with strongly held and often divergent views.
Previous attempts to address the issue had stalled. What was needed was an honest, rigorous, and independent assessment — one that could surface the hard choices clearly, build a shared understanding of the situation, and set out credible options for the decade ahead.
Curzon Approach
Working in close partnership with a specialist delivery partner, Curzon conducted a comprehensive assessment of the estate — visiting ten sites and interviewing 45 senior stakeholders to build a grounded, evidence-based picture of the challenge. The breadth of stakeholder engagement was deliberate: understanding where consensus existed — and where it did not — proved to be as valuable an output as the financial analysis itself.
Throughout the engagement, Curzon maintained a people-centred analytical lens. In a training environment, decisions about sites and facilities are inseparable from questions about people, culture, and operational effectiveness — and our recommendations reflected that. Options were developed and presented honestly, including the difficult trade-offs, rather than being softened to avoid hard conversations.
The final output laid out a structured 10-year roadmap, two primary rationalisation options, and four enhancement proposals — giving the client a clear framework for the Business Case process that would follow.