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.
