Operations · Manufacturing
The vital few
This Blueprint finds the few moves that carry the most upside in your gross profit, and tests each one against your own numbers before you commit a dollar. Most of a manufacturer's gross profit comes from a small part of the business. When orders outrun the plant, the rest of the book can be using hours the best work needs.
What it is
The Manufacturing Blueprint is a written plan built from your own financial and operating data. It shows which customers and products carry your gross profit, what a handful of targeted moves would do to it and whether your team can carry those moves. It runs in four stages, from reading the business as it stands to handing your team a pattern they run themselves. Nothing is funded until it has been tested against real numbers and real people.
What you receive
| Stage | What lands | What it settles |
|---|---|---|
| Read the business model | An 80/20 read on gross profit by customer and product, cost to serve, overhead and cost of sales | Which customers, products and cost lines matter, before any initiative is designed |
| Design the initiatives | A short, named list of initiatives across supply chain and capacity, scalability, and the retention of customers and people, each with an owner | What gets attempted and what does not, before any money moves |
| Test before committing | Each initiative pressure-tested against your own numbers and the team that would run it | Whether an initiative survives contact with the business before it is funded |
| Hand over the pattern | A written operating pattern, key performance indicators (KPIs) defined the same way at every site and an operating cadence your team runs on its own | How the business measures itself going forward, and whether a Build is warranted |
What it needs from you
- Financial and operating data by site, customer and product line, current and historical
- Access to the people who run the floor as well as those who manage it
- Leadership time to test each initiative, including the ones that fail
- A named person on your team who owns the pattern once it is handed over
How it ends
The engagement ends with a written pattern your team can run without us: the KPIs, the operating cadence and the reasoning behind every initiative, including the ones that did not make the cut. We propose a Build only where the numbers warrant one.
Where it fits
The Manufacturing Blueprint is the Blueprint for the Manufacturing lane in Operations. It follows a Survey that names manufacturing as the constraint. A Build follows it only where the tested initiatives warrant one. See the three stages for the full sequence.
Flourisha is our AI chief of staff. We run our own companies with her, and we install her with your team. See how she works.
Where to go from here
One hour of your time, no charge: fifteen minutes on the Growth Check, then a forty-five-minute video call. We read every answer before the call.