Outcomes
The recommended footprint optimisation was accepted in full — structured as a self-funding capital investment with a two-year payback period, removing the need for external capital commitment and making the business case straightforward to approve. The new operations and supply chain configuration directly addressed customers’ requirements for in-country sourcing, protecting existing contracts and unlocking future growth opportunities that the previous setup had put at risk. Implementation was designed around people from the outset — minimising disruption, reducing HR-related risk, and ensuring the retention of the critical capabilities the business depended upon. Key stakeholders across all principal sites were engaged and aligned throughout, giving the new model genuine organisational ownership.
Background
The organisation’s manufacturing and supply chain footprint had evolved organically rather than by design. The result was a web of complex intra-company and external supply chain relationships that drove slow production cycle times, unwieldy planning processes, and a cost base that made competitive pricing increasingly difficult — both for retaining existing customers and winning new ones.
The absence of a clear make-or-buy policy compounded the problem: costly in-house production was being maintained in areas where external sourcing would have delivered better value, while the rationale for what was made where had never been rigorously examined. Meanwhile, an emerging customer requirement for in-country sourcing added a new dimension of urgency — the existing footprint was not just inefficient, it was beginning to create a structural barrier to future contract growth.
The business needed more than a supply chain fix. It needed a fundamental rethink of where it operated, what it made, and how its sites related to one another — one that could be implemented without disrupting the operation or losing the people and capabilities that made it competitive.
Curzon Approach
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.
