Manufacturing Optimization

When organized and managed effectively, manufacturing operations can provide businesses with a significant competitive edge. To optimize your manufacturing function, you must examine manufacturing complexity and efficiency. Although driven by separate sets of circumstances, manufacturing complexity and manufacturing efficiency typically have substantial mutually reinforcing influence.

In manufacturing consumer or industrial products, your business encounters a level of complexity that can enable or derail success. Complexity is defined as the myriad processes that take place to deliver products or services to customers, even if the customer is not an end user. Events in the lifecycle of a business such as mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and new product launches all impact your level of complexity.

To ensure that complexity is augmenting your sales and margins, look to Alvarez & Marsal's Supply Chain professionals for support. Alvarez & Marsal approaches manufacturing optimization by simultaneously addressing manufacturing complexity and efficiency. We do not just provide recommendations to improve processes; our experienced professionals work alongside your team - and assume interim management roles if required - to implement solutions that enable positive change to take place.

Alvarez & Marsal Supply Chain professionals help your organization to reduce complexity and improve efficiencies by examining:

  • SKU Profitability - It is crucial for businesses to understand the true cost of each SKU in its portfolio. A&M helps you to analyze account volumes, manufacturing time, manufacturing efficiency (i.e., product set-up times, scrap, etc.), warehouse time and space requirements, product obsolescence, logistic and distribution costs to determine the value of each SKU.
  • SKU Proliferation - Many different variations of the same basic SKU can been created through changes in packaging, kitting with other SKUs, and modifications in the quality and type of internal components used. A&M examines this process and helps you streamline SKU operations.
  • Labor Alignment -Traditional manufacturing companies have labor content of between 20-30 percent of cost of goods sold (COGS). A&M helps you to align labor productivity measures with actual sales demand and manage the process proactively to account for seasonal variations that can dramatically improve efficiency.
  • Operational Improvement - A&M works with your team to identify root-causes of shop-floor operating inefficiency such as "by hour, by day" charts, and scrap reductions. We help you implement change-over time improvements and other lean manufacturing and Six Sigma activities.

Also see our Simplification services.

Leadership. Problem Solving. Value Creation.