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.
