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.
