Case study · Specialty manufacturing
A failed audit, and one machine to prove it.
A failed audit put a manufacturer’s process under a microscope. We started with one day on one machine. That single day grew into the largest engagement we run.
The situation
The knowledge was in the operators’ hands, not on paper.
A failed audit made the problem impossible to ignore: the way the work actually got done lived in the heads and hands of the people running the machines, not in anything you could hand to a new hire or show an auditor. That is a quiet risk right up until the day it is not, and the audit was that day.
What we did
We did not pitch a program. We proposed a single, bounded day of work: document one machine’s process, end to end, and let the result speak.
- Sat with the operators and captured exactly how the line actually ran, step by step, including the judgment calls nobody had ever written down.
- Turned it into a document, a map and a checklist a new person could follow and an auditor could trust.
- Proved, on one machine, that the tribal knowledge could be made transferable without slowing the floor down.
The result
One day became our largest engagement.
The one-day trial worked, so it did not stay one day. It grew, roughly tenfold, into an ongoing documentation partnership that now runs well beyond that first machine. It is the largest engagement KPI has, and it started with the smallest possible commitment against a named, dated defect.
One of eight. See the other results, or find your own weakest link.
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