What it looks like when it lands.

A 5.4 billion dollar underground mine, one of the world’s largest, needed a fresh approach to stay on track in a sector where half of all projects miss their forecasts, with each day of delay worth two million dollars of net present value. At peak construction it involved 16,000 workers, mostly local nationals, 900 suppliers, 200km of tunnels and a deep shaft. The client invited eleven consulting firms to bid, and Proudfoot won by recommending a holistic approach centred on people and behavior rather than technology.

Construction, development and production were happening at once underground, with hundreds of contractors on separate systems sharing the same infrastructure. Proudfoot designed and installed a bespoke Management Operating System and Integrated Project Planning process to optimize space, time and materials for 3,000 people. The defining move was to shift complexity from execution into planning, with digital work plans drawn up 48 to 72 hours ahead rather than the 24-hour norm.

Deployment inducted 120 frontline managers, all local nationals, built local-language coaching capability aligned to a government upskilling mandate, and used a simulation game to teach planning. Productive time reached 10 hours per 12-hour shift against an 8-hour industry average, the all-injury frequency rate hit 0.19 per 200,000 hours, and the project broke records while preserving $2M of net present value a day.

A Canadian gas distributor serving more than 400,000 customers lacked a consistent way of handling back-office tasks and any means to rank them. The company needed its customer-service back-office tasks standardized and a prioritization approach for future integrated digital solutions, with optimization required across 26 task groups spanning two departments, five locations and 120 employees.

Proudfoot delivered three workstreams. The first was standardization: 20 task groups were scoped and observed through more than 1,000 observations, a value-stream-mapping framework identified non-value-adding activity, and standards were defined for handle time, service level and skills level. The second was optimization through quick wins: standardized implementation, governance, meeting structure and KPIs were put in place, with 28 opportunities implemented within four weeks delivering $330k in benefit. The third was prioritization: a two-dimensional approach was designed and tested, linking prioritization to KPIs, and a standard operating procedure and four-month operationalisation plan were prepared to enable on-the-job testing during integration into future digital solutions.

The program cut workload by 40% and delivered $1.2M in annual savings, standardizing tasks across all 26 groups and establishing governance and KPIs. As the operational excellence manager noted, it was a self-sustaining program, leaving the client both more efficient and ready for digital integration.

A Canadian natural gas distributor needed to standardize and prioritize a large back-office operation as the foundation for a wider customer-contact modernisation program. Two departments totalling around 146 employees performed dozens of distinct task types with no agreed performance standards, no consistent prioritization logic and no documented operating procedures. Work was triaged ad hoc across customer type, seasonality, impact and source, and the client had deliberately funded only the first milestone of a five-milestone roadmap, pacing the wider program internally.

Proudfoot delivered a 15-week co-design across three parallel workstreams. Standardization defined handle-time, service-level and skill standards for 20 of 29 task categories, built on 893 task observations across 8 locations with the sample size statistically agreed up front. Prioritization produced a two-dimensional framework, weighted importance against service-level urgency, tested across 43 task groups and codified into a standard operating procedure grounded in the client’s existing dispatch practice rather than a blank-sheet construct. The quick-wins workstream implemented 28 of 33 identified opportunities within four weeks of identification, each on a one-page tracker through scoping, design, installation and sustain stages. A three-tier governance cadence with full terms of reference was installed and transferred to the client through mid-engagement governance training, and benefit tracking was aligned to the client’s existing dashboard rather than parallel tooling.

The engagement delivered a 40% back-office workload reduction, with CAD 1.196M in annualised benefits identified and agreed and CAD 322K realized at close through the quick wins. The deliberately deferred remainder was realized in full by the client’s own operational-effectiveness team once the future-state contact-center systems were implemented, evidence that the standards and governance installed in the first milestone carried the benefit through on the client’s own timeline.

A prominent Canadian nuclear utility was under board pressure to cut costs as customer usage fell, down 300 megawatts over three years, and operating costs rose 40%. The chief executive was frustrated by failed previous attempts to sustain efficiency and recognized that misaligned behaviors had to change for the utility to become a top-quartile performer and a more customer-centric asset to its province. Internal projects lacked momentum because behaviors could not be shifted, supervisors lacked leadership training, and there was no ownership without performance tracking. The utility needed savings and consistent processes across five operating companies.

Proudfoot, re-engaged on the strength of earlier successful work, conducted a thorough business review across generation, distribution, transmission and procurement strategy. An enterprise-wide productivity and process improvement program identified seven cost-saving areas: labor, hired services, overtime, inventory, vehicles, supply-chain management and real estate. A shared methodology was implemented for annual forecasting, monthly planning, scheduling and variance reporting, coaching audits strengthened skills and sustainability, and all supervision levels were trained in Active Management Behaviours, with customised metrics driving accountability.

The program delivered $33.7M in annualised recurring benefits, a further $10M from procurement practices and $16M more in identified savings. Five operating companies moved onto consistent processes, the bureaucratic mindset gave way to buy-in and ownership, and management gained the skills to facilitate change, transforming the utility into an aligned, productive organization.

A major zinc and gold producer in Central Asia, already operating world-class assets across four mines and a concentrator, wanted to find the next level of performance while keeping its people at the center of the operation. Proudfoot was invited to run a feasibility walkthrough to confirm whether the scope existed for lasting change in productivity, cost and management alignment.

The walkthrough included an alignment assessment of the senior mining and concentrator team against the CEO’s goals, establishing a behavioural baseline before any change began. A 26-week first phase then redesigned each work cycle, drilling, blasting, loading and hauling, and built a Management Operating System around Short Interval Control, structured shift handovers and a fixed review cadence. Supervisors ran SIC several times per shift to correct course in real time. The concentrator planning function, which had been stuck in reactive mode, was rebuilt so results tied back to specific units and managers.

In parallel, employees nominated as change agents earned P4 certification diplomas through 16 assessed modules, creating internal capability to hold the gains. Results came fast: a 47% capacity improvement in tons per manhour, 79% more running metres on blast hole drilling, a 21% cut in operational downtime and a 19% reduction in employee turnover. The client went on to apply the same approach at three additional mines.

A century-old North American mine was restarting operations after a ten-year maintenance shutdown, with high shareholder expectations placing significant pressure on the ramp-up plan and schedule. Proudfoot was engaged on the recommendation of a board member who had worked successfully with the firm at five other mining operations. The assessment found a ramp-up plan that lacked employee alignment and integrated project planning, only two licensed blasters available after the long reduction in workforce, limiting the mine to one or two blasts a day, and constantly changing frontline supervisors, managed by a third-party contractor, who lacked active supervisory skills despite their seniority.

The joint team ran the 16-week engagement as four sprints for rapid results. It improved the operating system with daily underground shift reports, Short Interval Control, shift planning boards, handover processes, root-cause analysis and skills coaching. To clear the blasting bottleneck, the team reached out to five state and federal agencies and got seven miners licensed in just 10 days, enabling four to six blasts a day. A new hiring process targeting retiring military personnel and miners from a recently closed mine delivered an 85% workforce increase, new teams refurbished equipment, and frontline managers received more than 80 hours of on-floor coaching in Active Management Behaviours.

The restart accelerated sharply: a 20% compression of the ramp-up schedule, an 11% improvement over plan in the first full month, a 225% increase in face advance and an 83% improvement in equipment reliability, giving the mine a fast, safe and sustainable return to production.

A copper and cobalt mining and recovery company in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a significant part of the global electric-vehicle supply chain, needed to meet rapidly rising demand while reducing unit cost. Proudfoot was engaged during the pandemic to uncover opportunities, support their realization and instil continuous improvement as a way of working.

Aerial Mapping, including pre-lockdown on-the-ground observation, found a firefighting culture with absent leading indicators, no formalised variance management and little or no proper planning, with maintenance and production operating in silos. Working remotely, Proudfoot implemented a Management Operating System connecting strategy through planning to execution, established a continuous-improvement framework supported by the 8 Active Management Behaviours, overhauled the maintenance and production work plans and trained employees on the maintenance pyramid of inspection, planning and execution.

The team fostered agile decision-making by empowering 1,620 employees with improved KPI visibility, and clarified roles and responsibilities through a handbook that set a common reference model, all underpinned by strong stakeholder engagement. The hybrid remote model proved that operational transformation could be delivered despite pandemic constraints. The work delivered $64M in annualised benefits, a 40% reduction in maintenance downtime, a 33% increase in copper recovery and a 31% increase in cobalt recovery, and the best production rates in the organization’s history.

A major mining and metals recovery company in the Democratic Republic of Congo plays a significant part in the global electric-car supply chain. The client needed to meet rapidly rising demand for copper and cobalt while reducing unit costs, and Proudfoot worked in partnership through the COVID-19 period. The assessment found a lack of Active Management Behaviours that left the operation firefighting rather than acting proactively, an absence of the data and leading indicators needed to manage the value chain, no formalised variance management to drive ownership and accountability, and planning and scheduling of work and resources that was limited or non-existent.

Through Aerial Mapping, combining pre-lockdown on-ground observation with remote methods, a sprint-based implementation road map was developed. The joint team implemented a Management Operating System connecting company strategy through long-term planning to scheduling and execution, and established a continuous improvement framework as a critical component, championed by certified client change agents. Work plans and workflows between maintenance and production were overhauled for better maintenance and spare-parts management, communication improved and silos were eliminated, and employees were trained on the maintenance pyramid of inspection, planning and execution. Roles and responsibilities were clarified, a best-practice handbook established, and 1,620 employees empowered through improved leading-KPI visibility.

The work delivered the best production rates in the organization’s history: $26.5M in additional copper and cobalt sales, a 34% increase in copper recovery, a 33% increase in cobalt recovery and a 23% safe increase in run-of-mine production, with continuous improvement embedded as an organisational mindset.

The owner of a European copper, gold and pyrite deposit had spent decades turning it into a high-quality, highly optimized mine, and had become synonymous with digital transformation in the industry, using connected technologies and an integrated control center to drive performance. Underpinning this was an existing Management Operating System. Having led the mine through a technological transformation, the client now wanted continuous improvement: a change in how people and processes were managed that would yield lasting, tangible results.

Proudfoot assembled experts in mining, change management, communications and HR to work across three workstreams. Because the client already led on technology, the focus was on giving people the framework and the management skills to work more effectively with the tools they had. The assessment found a lack of visible work standards, no master schedule, no shift-level performance measurement, and reporting that lacked efficiency-based KPIs. The control center was managing schedules rather than optimizing resources.

The mining workstream introduced tracking of planned versus actual ore movement and established Short Interval Control. The processing workstream installed a plant Management Operating System, stabilized bulk flotation and tracked 14 main KPIs against model parameters. The HR workstream delivered more than 180 hours of one-to-one Active Management Behaviours coaching and built an employee-lifecycle HR system. The results included roughly $4M in annualised benefits, a 0.9 percentage point improvement in flotation copper recovery, 14 certified managers each running their own improvement sprint, and a durable continuous improvement culture.

The chief executive of a distributor for a major home-improvement chain wanted profitable growth through a supply-chain competitive advantage. Installing a new operational structure for demand planning, procurement and order fulfillment was a top priority, but the chief executive knew it would be a challenge internally. At the same time a key client relationship was in jeopardy and required immediate action, while attrition across senior management was straining the remaining team and threatening continuity. The chief executive partnered with Proudfoot to accelerate the improvement initiatives.

A cost-benefit analysis identified the distribution center with the highest product volume as the basis for supply-chain network design. Opportunities on outgoing shipments were identified for order consolidation and route optimization, and sales-and-operations-planning elements allowed planners to forecast demand accurately for product launches and replenishment. Root-cause and corrective-action reports were developed to minimize supplier problems, and new processes for order management, along with the behaviors and controls behind them, were installed to expedite the fulfillment process.

The single assessment identified $95.6M in benefits, including a $33.3M reduction in inventory costs, and balanced demand against supply while expediting fulfillment and stabilizing the key client relationship. The work increased forecast accuracy, reduced lost sales, improved customer service and lifted margins, giving the distributor the supply-chain advantage its growth strategy depended on.

The business services division of a diversified electronics and aerospace organization was experiencing significant inter-company and intra-company accounting imbalances that caused large write-offs and hurt profitability. The company needed to improve processing quality quickly while selecting and transferring operations to a more appropriate and cost-effective location as a Center of Excellence.

Proudfoot worked with the client team across the full scope of the transformation. The team selected the most appropriate and cost-effective location for the Center of Excellence, prepared the site for acquisition, handled facilities installation, ensured the data communication systems were set up correctly, and designed the layout to maximize routine operations with allocated space for each function. The company’s operating model was then redesigned, reducing corporate, global business services and billing processes from 21 to 3, and standardized inter-company accounting policies were defined and documented for all strategic business groups. Comprehensive training was developed to embed the new processes and upskill the workforce at the new center.

The work delivered more than $10M in savings through the redesigned operating model, reduced headcount by 200 roles, and simplified processes from 21 to 3, with standardized accounting policies across every strategic business group. A brand-new Center of Excellence was fully stood up and operational, staffed by a workforce trained for the new ways of working.

A diversified global mining and metals major was committed to a multi-year capital program in primary aluminum, including a major potline expansion at an established smelter complex in a North American francophone industrial region. The capital portfolio exhibited the industry-standard pathologies, with around 90% of major projects over schedule and 47% over budget. At this expansion, construction was several months in and the construction productivity factor stood at 0.75 against a benchmark of 1.0 and a leading-capability target of 1.33. The mandate was twofold: build a capital-projects productivity framework deployable across the parent’s global portfolio, and pilot it live at the expansion first.

Proudfoot structured the work as a seven-phase framework-and-pilot program over roughly twelve months, interleaving framework design with live site delivery. The diagnostic relied on meeting-evaluation summaries rather than shop-floor observation, alongside dual-cohort maturity scoring and a nine-dimension behavioural assessment per subcontractor. The dominant improvement engine was continuous re-baselining: four full maturity reassessments and four behavioural reassessments per subcontractor in the first six weeks. A physical coordination center evolved into a hybrid physical-digital environment with live dashboards and Pareto analyzes per zone.

The seven specialist subcontractors plus the engineering and project-services provider were onboarded sequentially on a five-week cadence, with bilingual supervisor training across a two-session curriculum. Construction productivity rose from 0.75 to 1.33 over roughly seven months, a 77% improvement, with shift-startup duration halved and multi-contractor information sharing, described as impossible at the outset, breaking through. The installed operating system survived a leadership change at the project-services provider without collapse, and three recommendation sheets fed the parent’s enterprise playbook update for global replication.

A diversified global mining major had just completed a two-week rapid-assessment diagnostic on a distressed marine wharf reinstatement at one of its remote bulk-mineral operations. The diagnostic had quantified the verdict: 70% of operating-system elements existed but only 21% were effective, three competing planning truths ran across the project, and a three-day information lag separated work performed from reported, against a cost of delay of around $2M a day. The implementation had to land in a compressed nine-week window, against a four-tier client constellation, a fly-in/fly-out roster, a remote marine environment with genuine unknowns, and a fixed first-ore milestone.

Proudfoot delivered a nine-week rapid-action implementation across five themes: one team, plan and schedule optimization, the operating system, people and behavior, and quality management. It deployed a 14-element construction maturity pyramid and a 35-element construction operating-system assessment in parallel. Three planning truths were collapsed into one integrated hierarchy, the three-day lag was closed, and dual-version daily reporting was rationalised to a single shared version. A complication emerged early when a co-deployed consultant was withdrawn on medical grounds, leaving the lead consultant to deliver coaching solo.

Eight individuals received twelve-plus coaching sessions each, all delivered solo, and the operating system reached 81% maturity at close-out, with reporting at 88%, leading. The signature deliverable was a 50-plus-page capital-projects playbook co-authored with the client’s project director and carrying their foreword, and a mid-engagement scope reduction was banked in a formally signed revised-fee letter. The first-ore milestone held, construction completed, and a sister-site proposal in the high six figures for up to 18 months was submitted at close.

A diversified global mining major operating a remote bulk-mineral export operation had its primary product-handling wharf damaged by a tropical cyclone, triggering an emergency reinstatement project at a cost of delay of around $2M a day. Months into execution, the project showed schedule slippage, three competing versions of the truth across planning systems, a three-day information lag between work performed and reported, and visible owner-contractor misalignment. The mandate, set at executive level, was a first stage to earn the right to continue: a two-week rapid assessment to diagnose the project’s true state and recommend a path forward.

Proudfoot deployed a five-person team across two locations for a compressed rapid-assessment diagnostic. The work was organized around a three-lens methodology, operating-system maturity, people and behaviors, and survey and interviews, applied across the owner, the principal contractor and the engineering consultant, with each lens triangulating against the others. A construction-specific maturity instrument introduced a three-dimensional rating measuring whether each element existed, was used and was effective. The result was diagnostic: 70% of elements existed, 51% were used, but only 21% were effective, revealing a project short not of tools but of tools that worked.

Fourteen structured executive interviews spanned all three parties, and a priority-alignment survey ranked 12 priorities across nine-plus stakeholders, producing quantified evidence of misalignment. The findings were presented in a single joint session with all parties in the room, forcing alignment on one version of the truth, with a 40-item action log bridging diagnostic to implementation. Go-ahead came within 24 hours, converting the diagnostic directly into a nine-week implementation engagement, and a sister-site engagement was referred within the same client group.

A European producer of premium automotive interior trim, leather and artificial-leather seat covers, armrests and door panels for a flagship German SUV program, was carrying a profitability gap of roughly €1.5M a year against around €35M of site revenue. The diagnostic traced the loss to the management system rather than the technology: about half of available production time was being lost, supervisors were not actively managing on the line, visual boards were used mechanically, and the quality system blocked defects from reaching the customer instead of getting things right first time. A high-mix product blend, priority orders that repeatedly broke line balance, and heavy losses at every shift change compounded the problem.

Proudfoot delivered the implementation as a co-venture sprint model across the flagship line and a sister line: the first sprint Proudfoot-led with a client task force learning alongside, the second task-force-led with Proudfoot supporting from behind. Production planning was rebuilt around a single plan merging seven separate inputs, with a line-balance logic in which each shift’s leather and artificial-leather mix drives team setup and output targets together, and a redesigned hot-change shift handover that reorganised cleaning and end-of-shift control around an at-position swap. A custom real-time data system was built in the field, barcode scanning at end of line, automated KPI reporting on floor monitors, scrap and rework tracked by shift and hour, and handed over with a six-version development roadmap running through to ERP integration. Quality moved to right-first-time through a three-level quick-response routine with quantified triggers and timeline gates and a red-alert escalation process, while a complete local-language people toolkit installed the active-management behaviors, a training center with a 14-step operator qualification lifecycle, and the most detailed minute-by-minute team-leader standard work in the program’s record.

The planning fix alone lifted flagship-line efficiency by around 10%, with improvement visible in the data from the first week. The hot-change handover recovered roughly 30 minutes of production per changeover, the active priority queue fell from thousands of items to between 100 and 300, and a documented daily-output step-up followed on the sister line. Installation maturity was tracked per team leader across five operating-system rituals on a three-level scale from mechanical compliance to ownership, and the engagement closed with a 28-tool handover inventory and a continuation plan the client’s own task force was already running.

The European division of a global energy-storage provider serving the transportation, mining and utility sectors needed to improve efficiency and confirm the business case for transformation. The chief operating officer identified high-priority gaps: no standardized Management Operating System across the division, no transparency or visibility between divisions, and unstandardised pricing and business models. Rapid analysis showed that sites were not sharing best practice, inadequate management was causing lost time and downtime, maintenance resources and progress were not being tracked, the sales operating system lacked oversight tools, and sales teams were spending their time fixing problems instead of selling.

Proudfoot developed a strategic operational road map with the client team to reduce overall unit costs, with a focus on safety, environmental compliance, quality assurance, customer service and productivity. The road map installed an operating system with consistent financial measurement across all production facilities, weekly tracking of the financial impact of improvements, better forecasting accuracy, preventive maintenance prioritized for critical assets, rapid changeover programs, and a continuous improvement and cost-management culture built on shared best practice. Clarifying roles and responsibilities freed up sales capacity.

Implemented across the division, the road map delivered EUR 5M in total benefits at a 2.6:1 return, reducing costs for maintenance labor, external services and spares while standardizing the operating system. The work addressed both operational and commercial performance, with sales capacity recovered through role clarity and a continuous improvement culture left in place.

A long-standing European production facility making electronic inductors, employing around 500 people with three-quarters of output shipped to automotive customers, faced a step-change in demand as the industry shifted from combustion to electric vehicles. The site had invested in additional machine power and doubled its operator headcount, and now needed to double production capacity through an end-to-end operations transformation within six months, before new lines went live. The CEO turned to Proudfoot on the strength of prior success at the group’s plants across Europe and Asia.

Given the timeline, Proudfoot had to show quickly that improvement was achievable. The project opened with a 6-week sprint on two lines, then expanded line by line every 3 to 4 weeks. Early assessment found KPIs that were unavailable or inaccurate, undefined production goals, staff planning misaligned with the production plan, maintenance out of step with preventive plans, and no shop-floor management routine fit for peak performance.

The team installed automated shift reporting on output, quality, time and OEE, and reprogrammed every machine to display quality rates so operators could act on scrap thresholds. A new shift supervisor role, a continuous improvement action team for each line, a three-person preventive maintenance team and five internally recruited shift masters gave the operation lasting ownership. Each line gained 5 to 10% in volume within the first six months, with hundreds of improvement initiatives launched and the organization ready for aggressive growth.

A leading fertilizer and specialty-chemicals company needed a cultural change from risk-taking to prioritizing health and safety. It also needed HR integration, improved management competencies and stronger supervisory effectiveness. Adoption rates for new technology and tools were low, critical equipment was unreliable with high failure rates, and training was not driving the behaviors or outcomes the business wanted.

Proudfoot brought a targeted co-venture approach to build a safety framework and culture that would also improve production output. The team developed a safety framework that aligned the organization and built leadership consensus, then identified proactive safety indicators and integrated them with the Operations Management Operating System. Safety routines were developed for each organisational level, supported by daily coaching and one-up reviews, and structured around four layers of risk assessment: baseline, issue-based, task and continuous. Improvement roundtables and detailed job safety assessments were embedded within the production schedule, giving the operation regular opportunities to address behavioural issues and build ownership and commitment.

Safety and production improved together rather than trading off. Incident and severity rates fell 62.6%, total tons hoisted rose 17%, schedule attainment improved 50%, and adoption of the new safety software increased 30%. The result was a safety framework and culture that held, with the organization aligned around safety as a shared priority.

A major European producer of fine chemicals and performance materials, with complex synthetic capabilities, was watching margins deteriorate while struggling to meet demand. With over 10,000 SKUs, high process variability and no standardized best practice, leadership needed a detailed value stream map to determine whether margin per ton could be lifted.

Proudfoot deployed its Value Stream Mapping methodology, running facilitated workshops that trained, guided and coached the client team through current-state mapping of the existing process and future-state mapping of the target. The joint team assessed the chemical production process end to end to uncover bottlenecks, constraints, missing data and improvement opportunities.

The analysis was revealing. The as-is map showed two bottlenecks, with high variance and oscillation in cycle times and more than a quarter of the data showing extended lead times on individual process steps. Deviations were not properly documented and information was lost between shifts, and reliable, automatically generated data simply did not exist. The headline finding was that a 12% production volume increase was achievable with no capital spend. Proudfoot delivered a two-pillar roadmap, technical and data-based sprints to reduce variability alongside a Management Operating System to document deviations, harmonise working methods and embed best practice, opening a path to more than 10% margin improvement.

The same European battery manufacturer needed to reduce energy consumption across 12 plants as part of an ongoing margin improvement program driven by rising input costs. An in-depth review of end-to-end operations, including employee behaviors, revealed that best practices were not shared across sites, energy was not treated as a priority, effective energy management systems were absent, and the monitoring and collection of energy data was sporadic and inconsistent.

A joint client-and-Proudfoot team was formed to define best practices and drive execution across all 12 plants. Existing practices were overhauled with a single, robust energy management system that standardized meters and reporting measures. Behavior change was the crucial element: through effective communication and engagement, the client’s teams changed their views on energy use and took responsibility for lasting change. Employees were trained through a bespoke program that combined classroom sessions with practical on-the-floor exercises, and the teams went on to implement 400 energy-saving initiatives across compressed air, motors, lighting, gas and HVAC systems.

The program cut energy consumption by 10% across the 12 plants and reached cash neutral within six months, alongside a significant reduction in CO2 emissions and lower operating costs through improved raw-material and scrap levels. A comprehensive global management report gave new visibility and accountability, with performance reviewed weekly by the global executive team, and an energy-conscious culture took hold at the front-line supervisory level.

A market-leading manufacturer of lead-acid batteries for the industrial and transportation sectors faced rising input costs, particularly lead and energy, that threatened margins and competitive position. The vice president of operations for Europe initiated a series of improvement programs and invited Proudfoot back, on the strength of prior transformation work, specifically to reduce inventory returns. A detailed review across four manufacturing sites, a recycling unit and headquarters revealed significant inconsistencies: best practices were not shared, forecasting and production were disconnected, and management tools lacked the information needed for effective decisions.

A joint client-and-Proudfoot team was formed to define best-in-class inventory management and drive execution across all plants. Existing practices were overhauled into one harmonised system with standardized inventory categories and sub-categories. Better forecasting tools and inventory reporting were implemented to cope with site complexity and seasonality, enabling timely decisions, and the team identified more than 110 actions to improve purchasing and procurement. A comprehensive management report was installed to track KPIs weekly and hold the operation accountable.

Within eight weeks the business had established best-in-class inventory practice. The work delivered EUR 14M in savings, a 33% reduction in inventory returns and improved working capital, with the workforce now actively managing cash flow and maintaining stock levels according to seasonality rather than relying on added headcount to cope.

A subsidiary of a leading French bank and insurance group, manufacturing home-safety products such as alarm panels, sensors, keypads, remote controls and smoke detectors, was chronically underperforming on both productivity and profitability. Despite a 52% revenue increase in a single year, the operating result had swung into the red as purchasing costs climbed 64% and consumed all the margin growth. The facility, around 118 staff producing surface-mount cards, was run by sight with zero operational KPIs: no OEE tracking, no on-time-in-full measurement, no cadence monitoring, no defect tracking and no formal planning or meetings. It operated 1,000 kilometres from a parent that controlled key supplier contracts. The client required transformation across production efficiency, purchasing cost reduction and margin optimization, all within French labor-law constraints.

Proudfoot deployed a five-sprint delivery method in which the two-week diagnostic designed the full implementation road map. The diagnostic ran 22 studies in six days, engaging more than 85 people, decomposed OEE across five lines and built a pro-forma P&L. The implementation then created a complete operating system from scratch: 16 or more new KPIs with formal specification sheets, a three-tier meeting rhythm, Short Interval Control, an ideal-day and ideal-week template, an end-to-end RACI across more than 60 value-chain steps, a master-schedule procedure, and a purchasing tender across 20 suppliers. A structured proximity-management coaching program and a 130-point ergonomics assessment rounded out the work.

The greenfield operating system transformed the facility’s industrial identity. CMS output rose 18%, the labor-productivity ratio rose 13%, OEE improved 8.6 points from 52% to 60.6%, and the purchasing tender identified EUR 970K of savings. As the divisional president noted, the daily involvement and professionalism had highlighted many areas of improvement to keep developing.

A French market leader in private-label salmon and smoked-fish processing faced extreme seasonality, with November and December accounting for 30% of annual sales and demanding a 67% increase in headcount, from 300 to 500 employees. Getting the right people trained quickly enough for the peak was a struggle, and working with fresh product meant little inventory could buffer the swing. The assessment found inaccurate production standards that distorted resource and capacity allocation, no KPI monitoring for timely reaction to variance, managers absorbed in admin and reactive work, line leaders who did not direct workers or know their shift goals, an operating system that gave no clear daily, shift or line plan, and no Short Interval Control to support root-cause analysis.

A detailed analysis program combined interviews, shop-floor and process studies and operating-system and behavioural assessments. The joint team then designed and implemented a robust, sustainable operating system with hourly results tracking. Supervisors and the scheduling team were coached on the work-to-time relationship, accurate standards were set to enable variance identification, corrective action and line balancing, and a master schedule was developed to allow greater volumes. A perfect-day scenario prepared the line under best conditions to surface best practices for roll-out, roles were redefined, and supervisory teams were coached in Active Management Behaviours.

The effect on the bottom line was dramatic: operating profit rose 94% against the previous year, productivity improved 10%, and handover improvements gained 12% of production time, all by fixing the standards and management discipline at the root of the problem.

A global airline needed greater certainty around aircraft turnaround times during light checks while driving down aircraft-on-ground incidences. The targets were to reduce employee costs by 15% and total time by two hours for light checks. All checks were outsourced to a third-party maintenance provider, which made any solution a joint effort. The assessment found work poorly planned with uncontrolled cycle times and high variance, little monitoring or root-cause analysis, planned work not executed to requirements as bay supervisors used personal discretion, and spare parts rarely available for unplanned tasks.

Proudfoot educated and coached airline and provider employees in a people-led Lean transformation model that combined behavior-based change, SMED tools and Lean methodologies. A joint transformation team analyzed cycle-time variances, planning for unplanned checks, task scheduling and the holistic information flow from airline and provider planners through to engineers. Engineers and supervisors worked as a change management task force to identify and quantify lead-time and direct-labor cost reductions, and the program addressed operator use of processes and KPIs, supervisor coaching and management skills, the use of the operating system by middle and senior management, and the improvement team’s own change-management capability.

The work delivered a 15% reduction in employee costs and turnaround time, a two-hour reduction in lead time and a 20% improvement in on-time performance, shifting the culture from discretionary to standards-based execution across a joint airline-and-provider team.

A global automotive and industrial sensors manufacturer needed to compress product-creation lead time inside its temperature-and-pressure-sensor R&D organization, roughly 166 engineers across three sites in three countries. The executive team set three objectives: shorten product-creation lead time by roughly one third and eliminate projects running past three years, connect the engineering-development process to the management process, and bring transparency to resource management. The methodological challenge was that conventional operational tools are built for production environments; here the production line is a sequence of design-review gates, throughput is projects per engineer-year, and waste is rework and queue time between gates.

Proudfoot adapted the entire toolkit for engineering knowledge work and ran the assessment in parallel across all three countries: more than 20 executive interviews, 17-plus day-in-the-life studies re-categorised for design work, 26 meeting observations, structured past-project reviews sorting completed projects into archetypes, a 63-respondent engineering functional assessment, office-process mapping including an outside-in view from adjacent departments, and an analysis of more than 617 projects in the client’s portfolio-management system. Implementation opened with a 25-workshop co-design sprint processing over 300 improvement inputs from 35 key players, then installed the operating system across four profit centers: a yearly-to-daily planning cascade, a KPI tree with traffic-light criteria, per-center meeting terms of reference, a 28-task effort-estimation capacity model, and three standard project plans configured in the client’s own system. A multi-time-zone daily standup and a chartered cross-site design-review process bridged the European and Southeast Asian sites.

The centrepiece sustainability mechanism was a 98-slide operating-system playbook co-authored by a senior client executive alongside the Proudfoot delivery lead, with documented reuse rights over the trainable material. Around 27 managers across the three sites completed the active-management-behaviors program, supported by a full toolkit from pocket book to scorecard, and the working cadence continued under client ownership beyond the engagement, with lead-time benefits accruing over the measurement window that engineering change requires.

A global manufacturer of air-to-air refuelling systems and weapons platforms was struggling to meet delivery dates, where on-time-in-full delivery is critical to client satisfaction. Senior leadership blamed an overreliance on contingent labor, but internal change efforts had not worked. The chief executive engaged Proudfoot to make rapid, enduring change.

Proudfoot found that contingent labor was a symptom, not the cause. The underlying issues were weak planning, unclear accountability, the absence of a management operating rhythm and reactive supervisory behavior. The team installed a new Management Operating System with tiered visual boards to manage variance and triage issues, and energised the business with a sprint-based delivery model.

Leadership was developed by coaching the 8 Active Management Behaviours at every level. Job roles were aligned, skills matrices built and accountability clarified, while data-driven forecasting improved bid accuracy and balanced demand against supply. Managers shifted from firefighting to managing proactively against plans. The on-time promise rate rose 66%, the engagement delivered a $7.4M benefit, and self-assessed employee morale improved 59%. Because the change addressed behavior rather than symptoms, the client was left with a governance model it described as the new business-as-usual, not a dependence on consultants.

Facing a significant EBITDA gap against budget with only weeks until year-end, the chief executive of a global building-materials company engaged Proudfoot to rapidly analyze the business and reduce operating costs across every product line and cost center, with 15 weeks to deliver.

The gap was not a single root cause but spread across multiple product lines, cost centers and sites, each with different levers, hidden from leadership by siloed decision-making. After a one-week rapid analysis, Proudfoot ran a 14-week implementation across five workstreams. In aggregates, three joint teams standardized the operating model across 36 sites. In cement, a new operating standard reduced process variance, centralised governance, optimized alternative fuels and addressed inter-site transfer costs across eight plants. Purchasing increased year-end supplier rebates, SG&A teams across 25 departments executed local non-labor cost reductions, and supply chain and logistics were tightened.

The key accelerant was a weekly working committee presenting progress to the chief executive and finance chief for immediate decisions, replacing what would normally be monthly or quarterly cycles. The work delivered a €20M EBITDA improvement, a 12.8% year-end EBITDA impact that exceeded target, a 15:1 return on the consulting investment, and cash-neutrality by week four.

A global building-materials group’s relationship with Proudfoot began with a quarry optimization project that delivered $6M in initial benefits. That success grew into a decade-long partnership for end-to-end transformation across a network of 900 locations in 45 countries. The client needed consistent results delivered at speed worldwide, across operations spanning commercial, supply chain and logistics, post-merger integration, and general and administrative functions, with solutions localised inside a global framework.

Over more than ten years and over 50 engagements, Proudfoot built trust through unvarying results, using a boots-on-the-ground method to identify local needs and design and implement optimization at every site. Each project was underpinned by a consistent assessment using Aerial Mapping, interviews, process reviews, value driver trees, organisational studies, behavioural diagnostics and maturity assessments. Implementation applied an agile sprint method with parallel technical and behavioural sprints. The work spanned the full value chain, commercial excellence, operational excellence, quality, supply chain and transport, SG&A, and post-merger integration, and designed bespoke operating models that standardized processes and aligned sites on common benchmarks.

The partnership retained more than $250M in financial benefits over the decade, with engagement returns above 5:1 and frequent cash-neutral payback within twelve months. Just as significant was the legacy: a fully engaged, behaviourally transformed workforce with a continuous improvement culture, consistently achieving results at speed across the global network.

A global cement company with operations across Southern Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa and South America needed to raise EBITDA by reducing cost per tonne. The issues differed between countries, and each of five plant regions believed itself incompatible with the others. International benchmarks were dismissed as inapplicable, and an aligned vision seemed impossible.

Proudfoot designed a next-generation operating model in six weeks across three pillars, Process, People and Performance. Every country contributed to every element to ensure buy-in, and a maturity scoring mechanism assessed each plant against the ideal standard. A pilot at one home-country location used Proudfoot team members to drive behavioural change through the shift cycles from day one, with frontline supervisors trained in Active Management Behaviours and working and steering committees keeping shop-floor change aligned to senior management’s vision.

After the pilot, a ten-day bootcamp trained internal change agents who then led implementation across all home-country plants over 20 weeks, cut to five days for international locations as the method matured. The agents became the face of change while Proudfoot moved to background support. The work delivered a 5 to 10% EBITDA increase depending on country, €1 to €2 per tonne saved, more than an hour of lost time removed at handover, and benefits 15% above the original commitment.

One of the world’s leaders in crop production and protection, with a long history in Brazil, its second largest market, wanted to nearly double sales from US$180M to US$300M and lift market share to 16%. Despite the ambition, growth had stalled and share was slipping. The executive team recognized it could not get there through internal effort alone and turned to Proudfoot to overhaul a sales organization of 200 people across 16 branches and three regions.

Proudfoot’s review found opportunity at every stage of the sales cycle: new representatives were handed territories with little client history or targeting, managers had no view of representative capability and could not coach effectively, spans of control ranged from 6 to 24 reports, and too much time went on administration rather than selling. Seven joint task forces standardized the process across all three regions. The team built a client database segmenting customers by location, crop type and potential, a weekly planning tool, a master schedule and a reporting mechanism comparing results to target.

Administrative tasks, telemarketing and order follow-up moved to a call center, freeing representatives for client-facing work, and a relationship-selling skills program trained 180 representatives, 16 managers and 16 coordinators. The results were striking: more than $13M in benefits, 83 to 90% of visits now focused on high-potential clients, a 200 to 300% increase in sales visits, and market share in the largest region, 70% of company sales, rising from 13.3% to 20.9% within ten months.

A global energy and chemicals company, with tens of thousands of employees across many countries, faced non-standardized ways of working across its Eurasian operations division. Different workplace cultures across its plants in Germany, Italy and South Africa produced stark differences in development and operational performance against best-in-class group standards. Firefighting and finger-pointing were endemic, and the operations-excellence director saw the chance to organize far more effectively, especially at the interfaces between major departments.

Proudfoot deployed a three-pillar analytics approach: a top-down best-practice heat map of strengths and weaknesses per plant, a bottom-up set of day-in-the-life studies of management and the shop floor, and a data-driven comparison of year-over-year results, forecasts against actuals and P&L variation. This exposed the performance differences clearly. An 11-week proof of concept involving two people from each of four plants developed new division-wide operating-system elements, with the client insisting that ways of working be integrated across countries rather than dictated from one site.

A 40-week implementation followed, with full-time coaching of line leaders and supervisors, master classes to build cross-site team spirit, and the creation of internal operational-excellence specialists. The work identified €12M of benefits over three years, broke even shortly after implementation, and delivered a 2% throughput gain in sold-out facilities, a 4% energy saving and a 3% maintenance cost reduction, standardizing 48 work processes.

One of the largest engineering companies in the world, operating in over 100 countries with more than 100,000 employees, wanted to improve project delivery and customer satisfaction. With its engineering workforce spread across separate countries, the group needed to lift team productivity through better workforce planning and more efficient resource sharing. Management engaged Proudfoot for a holistic review of engineering team activity and the design of a new management system that would create visibility of the sales funnel and improve global resource allocation, including task-cost analysis for project-to-project value management.

The joint team reviewed resource management practices across several countries, examining the operating model and the systems behind it. The findings were consistent: there was no common system or tool to forecast demand or identify available resources across countries, which led to unnecessary external hires; capacity was unbalanced, with shortages in one country and surplus in another; and there was no shared process for exchanging information, resources or best practice.

The roadmap focused on a common resource management framework with standard systems and tools, standardized Sales and Operations Planning to match demand against available staff, consistent sales forecasting that captured engineering requirements the same way everywhere, and a dedicated team implementing a master scheduling tool as the central repository for all opportunities and project plans. The result was a 12% productivity improvement, a 9% reduction in project lead time and a 25% decrease in subcontractor costs, with low-value activity redirected to lower-cost locations and future needs now foreseeable from the pipeline.

A global filtration manufacturer, recently separated from its parent corporation, was struggling with execution at its largest Latin American plant. Five production lines covering air, oil, fuel and coolant filters suffered poor OEE, ranging from 43% to 61%, alongside low schedule attainment and excessive changeover frequency. Forecast accuracy looked healthy at 4% variance in aggregate, but item-level analysis revealed that 39-51% of items swung significantly month to month, driving material shortages and chronic backorders. Production standards had not been updated in over two years, and a layer of operators existed purely to work around maintenance and quality failures.

Proudfoot deployed a compressed implementation that ran assessment, design and installation in parallel across all five lines within a single delivery cycle, with a nine-person bilingual team producing every deliverable in both English and Spanish. A forecast-variation analysis reframed the planning problem by showing 40% item-level swings hidden behind the 4% aggregate. A supervisor time study found active supervision at just 11% of shift time. The team installed hourly OEE tracking across all lines, short interval control, and a three-week locked schedule plant-wide, with planning standardized across every planner.

A supervisor behavior model documenting every minute of the shift lifted active supervision from 11% to 35%, and OEE training reached all line supervisors, supported by two formal standard operating procedures as enduring leave-behinds. OEE improved 47.4% across the five lines and schedule attainment rose from 55% to 82% on volume, with $1.655M of agreed benefits and a further multi-million-dollar headcount opportunity identified. The engagement delivered its full first phase against a difficult on-site dynamic.

A global pharmaceutical leader faced unparalleled demand, but its flagship European plant, with more than 2,000 employees supplying 75 countries, could not satisfy it, causing significant stockouts and lost sales. A sustainable 15% productivity increase was required, achieved by engaging the workforce, and no short-term internal solution was available. The chief operating officer engaged Proudfoot.

A joint team set out to understand the constraints on productivity, designing a pilot across four production lines. Aerial Mapping worked closely with the workforce in a bottom-up approach, and employees identified multiple improvement opportunities. A critical diagnostic finding was that the existing OEE system produced copious data, but the raw data captured on the floor was poor quality, which prevented operating problems being identified and quantified. Proudfoot developed a smart operating system that got the right information to the right people: it flagged deviations and auto-calculated OEE per order from real-time, accurate data. Floor tours, root-cause analysis, daily cross-functional production meetings and regular technical get-togethers ensured prompt resolution, while a customised training and coaching program engaged a mature workforce and addressed management behavior weaknesses.

The pilot met its target, lifting productivity 15% on a continuously tracked basis and halving stockouts from 600 to 280 items a week, which eliminated lost sales. Its success led management to request a roll-out across the remaining 24 production lines.

A global grain-and-oilseeds trading and logistics group was several years into a worldwide roll-out of a single integrated supply-chain planning system, the platform becoming its operational system of record for vessel planning, terminal obligations, slot allocation and centralised planning. With roughly nine countries already live, an Asia-Pacific regional business unit spanning two countries was next. The client owned the program and needed specialist support to establish exactly how the standard system fitted the regional business, execute the adoption work to close the gaps, and lock in the value with a measurement rhythm the regional team would sustain on its own.

Proudfoot delivered through a single named senior consultant in three braided phases. A six-week on-site fit-gap covered the regional trade, operations and import functions, analyzing the requirement set, plotting around 21 items on an impact-by-ease matrix, mapping each function’s process, parking deferred items, and quantifying the business case, a method carried forward from a prior systems fit-gap at the same group, proving the approach travels across platforms. An 18-week managed-service phase then executed the configuration and adoption work, while a parallel aftercare arrangement supported the regional IT team. Sustainment came through deliberate cadence design: a six-KPI weighted scorecard with the review rhythm tightened from quarterly to monthly as an explicit change anchor, daily head-office and weekly regional check-ins bridging the time zones, training under a five-stage change-management lifecycle, and a written services-restart runbook handed to the regional team.

The unit went live with a 95.08% total weighted KPI achievement against its 95% target: vessel-operations updates at 100%, zero manual data-entry transposition errors, planning-load updates at 99%. Planning centralised onto a single source of truth, removing roughly four hours of spreadsheet work per planner each week, with the immediate fit extended to an adjacent read-only country node. The quantified business case of €219,444 in annual run-rate savings against the client’s one-time investment implied a payback of around nine months, and a ready-to-go fit-gap template positioned the next country in the roll-out.

A global lithium producer needed to increase on-time-in-full delivery, raise overall asset utilization, strengthen maintenance and reliability performance, and improve management skills and execution across its worldwide operations. Significant capacity expansion and an upcoming merger made a step-change in operations critical for market share and profitability. Having already addressed safety and quality, the next priority was a robust maintenance and reliability organization built on a standardized asset-management framework and a global target operating model. The client viewed Proudfoot as a trusted long-term partner.

Assessments were conducted across four sites in three countries and three languages, ensuring alignment on the opportunities and enabling collaboration between sites as an early, tangible benefit. The target-operating-model design involved a governance structure of design board, working committee and steering committee, covering the key maintenance and reliability processes, the Management Operating System to manage them, the organisational structure to support both, and the business case for implementation. All on-the-ground teams participated fully and with ownership, and the final deliverable was an agreed global operating model with a roll-out road map, with the Proudfoot System and co-venture approach cited as critical success factors.

The work projected $6.1M in annualised benefits from improved overall asset utilization, with an initial on-time-in-full target of 60%, and established a governance structure to sustain the gains. The client subsequently requested a proposal for a long-term partnership, with the new operating model positioned as the foundation for both capacity expansion and merger integration.

A global metals company running an integrated mining, refining and smelting complex in Asia needed to rapidly raise productivity and cut costs as metals prices fell. The brief was to transform logistics and the supply chain to improve service and quality, upgrade the supplier base, reduce inventory and improve return on working capital.

The integrated complex had a fragmented supply chain with excessive stockholding, poor asset availability and unmanaged process variability, while fuel, tyres and primary-process consumables were substantial, unoptimised cost drivers. Proudfoot identified the major opportunities across the whole value chain, from maintenance spares through operational consumables to contractors and suppliers, then designed and installed a sitewide supply-chain management system with localised management processes.

A plan-of-control management system centralised planning and decision-making, streamlined processes and improved communication across the value chain, supported by a detailed examination of the components contributing most to variability. Managers and workers were coached on the new methods and behaviors. The work delivered $34.8M of first-year annualised benefits, a 330% return on the client’s investment, a 12% throughput increase, a 24% reduction in the capital expenditure required for the existing workload, and a 4% cut in high-sulphur fuel oil consumption.

A global mining company developing a major copper deposit was experiencing significant delays in shaft sinking. The contractor needed to reach a target weekly sinking rate and was well below it. The contractor invited Proudfoot to review the current operating process and help improve it without compromising safety.

Proudfoot analyzed the variability of the sinking cycle over 25 benches against the project plan, revealing substantial discrepancies in every cycle element, then assessed the whole operation, processes, organization, behaviors, communication and management systems. The findings pointed to a reactive problem-solving culture, misaligned communication between shifts, unstandardised blast design and crews not prepared to execute to targets at shift start, with no root-cause analysis for recurring issues.

The team defined optimal cycle times for each element, sharpened shift start and end expectations, improved communication and implemented cycle-time compliance monitoring. Safe Work Procedures were developed, blast design standardized between shifts, and a supervisory behavior profile, a Short Interval Control model and a Management Operating System with clear roles put in place. Lean principles were applied to surface logistics, root-cause-analysis training reached all management levels, and Change Agents were developed for knowledge transfer. Quick wins arrived in the first four weeks, and within ten weeks the sinking rate improved 25%, taking performance beyond the original target.

After a successful engagement at its North American operations had delivered millions in benefits and a lasting culture change, a global potash producer asked Proudfoot to repeat the work overseas. The brief was to revitalise a safety-first culture, lift workforce engagement and reduce unit costs by eliminating losses in production, procurement, energy and logistics, all without layoffs or disruption.

Proudfoot worked alongside more than 270 frontline employees to design, install and institutionalise a new Management Operating System. The system simplified and standardized operations, improved communication, aligned the workforce to a common plan and created daily KPI visibility for milestone tracking. The root issue was not a single cause but a systemic lack of operational visibility and management discipline across several areas, so the response addressed all of them at once.

A 3,000-hour coaching and training program rebuilt the safety mindset. Procurement was streamlined through purchase strategies and blanket agreements, removing around 85% of non-critical purchase orders. Energy management was tightened to reduce water consumption relative to production, vital for the site’s social license, and logistics were optimized to cut trips from plant to port. The work delivered a 12% faster recovery rate, a 7% labor productivity gain, a 6% throughput improvement, 5 million hours worked free of lost-time injuries, and a 5x return on the client’s investment.

A $3.5bn global specialty-chemicals company with more than 30 manufacturing sites set out to reduce inventory across its North American operations. It had recently centralised its supply chain, consolidating three independent business units, serving hygiene, construction and engineering applications, into a single function. Each unit had run different processes, metrics, systems and stocking strategies. Inventory stood at $189M with 69.1 days on hand, well above benchmark, and there was no single point of accountability for driving reduction. Multiple data sources gave conflicting figures, and finance reporting lagged operational reality by 30 days.

Proudfoot followed a strategic assessment with a direct supply-chain operating-system implementation, deploying a four-partner delivery model spanning analytics, demand methodology and technology advisory. A team of data scientists analyzed 27,527 plant-material combinations, recommending $28.6M of safety-stock reductions from a $52M base and segmenting slow-moving items for disposition. A week-two opportunity-harvesting session generated 46 actionable opportunities, leading to $9.5M of blocked stock removed and $13.2M of safety-stock reductions codified during the engagement. Four parallel workstreams mapped 26 end-to-end processes across five functions and consolidated three business-unit processes into one centralised model.

An 80-slide ways-of-working toolkit was built as the supply-chain operating system, with KPI trees, terms of reference, role profiles and daily, weekly and monthly regimens for each of the five functions. Around $54M of inventory was eventually released, roughly a 10:1 return on total program value, as consumption patterns and contract terms worked through the system, demonstrating that analytical value in supply-chain transformations often materialises over a longer horizon than the engagement itself.

A global steel fabrication company faced tightening regulatory constraints pushing production costs up while revenue growth stalled against intensifying competition. The divisional president was convinced a 20% throughput increase and a cost-per-ton reduction were achievable, but an overwhelmed leadership team had no resources for a deeper assessment. Managers and supervisors were consumed by reactive problem-solving, and existing lean and six sigma efforts were not delivering.

The reason lean and six sigma were not working was that managers were stuck in firefighting, with no time for root-cause analysis or frontline engagement. Proudfoot ran four rapid continuous-improvement events that delivered major improvements through education, training, coaching and skills development, strengthening the existing lean processes while building worker confidence.

The team established a more holistic, measured approach to problem-solving, stopping the symptom-chasing and addressing root causes, and channelled the collective experience of the workforce to reinvent working methods and minimize waste. New management tools engaged and empowered frontline workers, and enhanced metrics tracked shift and employee outcomes and calculated lost time to build accountability. In six weeks the work delivered $4M in annualised benefits and a 20% throughput increase, reversing the margin erosion by adding the people and behavior dimension that lean alone had missed.

A global Tier 1 mining company was constructing one of the world’s largest potash mines in a remote Canadian location. Phase 1 was estimated at around $7 billion and had already absorbed significant cost overruns and schedule delays. The immediate risk was that the wet-processing plant would not be enclosed before harsh winter conditions arrived. At engagement start, the wet mill stood at level 3 of 6, with 61 of 136 pre-assembled units still pending installation, the site-wide productivity factor at 0.70 against a 0.95 target, and work packages being issued with only 60% of materials available, forcing crews into reactive execution.

Proudfoot deployed a recovery-assurance team across four concurrent sprints. Five quick wins landed in the first weeks, including daily piping coordination meetings, materials staging improvements, readiness visual boards integrated with the client’s own operating system, and crane management through time-block scheduling. At week five a sponsor change reduced the scope from six deliverables to one, and the team re-chartered to a site-wide materials-management diagnostic. More than 12 structured stakeholder interviews mapped the full material flow across three contractors, identifying seven findings themes weighted by frequency, with data integrity the largest.

The wet-mill building wrapped 15 days ahead of the winter deadline and pre-assembled units completed 32 days early. Craft productivity improved from 0.70 to 0.95 in two months and work-order material readiness rose from 60% to 80%, with 500 spools released by resolving a single quality-control paperwork issue. Five warehouse method-of-procedure documents and six portfolio improvement initiatives were left as a continuation roadmap, all while the team navigated a competitor consultant on the same site.

A global manufacturer of wound-care medical devices was performing poorly across its American sales operation, and management could not identify the cause. The company’s private-equity owners asked Proudfoot to analyze the business and build a roadmap. A rapid analysis uncovered five issues: weak product knowledge, insufficient pre-sales and objection planning, sales reps focused on maintaining accounts rather than prospecting, regional managers with minimal visibility of daily activity, and unclear KPIs. The analysis identified between twelve and fourteen million dollars of missing revenue.

Proudfoot partnered with sales leadership to develop a Sales Management Operating System featuring clear operational metrics, activity-based reporting tools, Short Interval Control and root-cause analysis. A web-based application enabled real-time capture and reporting, rolling up from territory managers to executive summaries and tracking presentations held, conversion rates and dollar values per customer commitment.

Twenty-eight regional sales managers received more than 100 days of in-field operating-system training, and 311 sales team members received 196 days of relationship-selling skills training with role-plays, supported by product training videos and a call-planning tool. Real-time activity visibility ran from territory to executive level, enabling corrective action on live data. The work delivered a 75% increase in sales presentations and a 13% increase in dollars per presentation, giving management the capability to coach underperformers, against the $12M to $14M revenue opportunity identified.

A multinational iron-ore producer was building a large-scale greenfield mine, rail loop, stockyard and load-out complex in a remote, equatorial, multi-language region of West Africa under an owner-led integrated project delivery model. Bulk earthworks, the cut, fill, haulage, crushing and stockpiling that everything else depended on, were the binding constraint on the critical path to first ore, and the two earthworks contractors were behind. The owner needed schedule recovery fast: the value was the contractors hitting their construction milestones, not an in-year cost case.

Proudfoot delivered a twelve-week, two-contractor parallel acceleration under a single owner-side working committee, structured as four synchronised workstreams totalling more than 200 deliverables. A two-day site review produced the evidence base, including a start-of-day study that quantified roughly three and a half hours of wasted shift time and a recoverable scenario of more than an hour per shift. Because greenfield processes existed to be designed rather than mapped, the team ran a 58-SIPOC stakeholder-area program in place of traditional process mapping. A thirteen-meeting cascade was designed and then specialized per contractor, radio-based short-interval control was commissioned at the run-of-mine pad, visual management boards became the language-neutral primary communication mechanism across a site running Guinean local languages, French, Portuguese, Chinese and English, and a loss-analysis discipline across availability, utilization and operating loss entered daily reporting. A recovery workshop with the lead contractor produced 30 acceleration actions, and supervisor capability transferred through train-the-trainer sessions in each contractor’s own language.

All four workstreams reached 100% completion by week fourteen. The lead contractor’s monthly production target was rebaselined 78% higher over a three-day window mid-engagement, and its production reached roughly 90% of that revised target by close. Sustainability vested in the owner’s internal improvement team, scaled from four to ten people during the engagement, and the war room and remaining activities carried deliberately into the successor program rather than being closed.

A multi-billion-dollar greenfield iron-ore operation in a remote, high-medical-risk West African location was ramping its workforce from roughly 1,000 toward 11,000 people with around 115 contractors on site, and needed one integrated management operating system to bring every stakeholder into a single framework, protect an aggressive early-ore date and recover bulk-earthworks contractors running behind plan. The client’s leadership framed the objective simply: a system to tell the operation whether it was behind or on track, and if behind, whether it was in control. With production ramping from effectively zero there was no conventional P&L case; the value was early-ore enablement and contractor recovery.

Proudfoot delivered an eight-sprint, two-phase design and implementation across an eleven-month window. The operating system was rendered in a ten-element, fifteen-tool framework deliberately shaped to mirror the framework the client’s leaders knew from a sister operation: an integrated planning process from monthly planning through weekly roll-out to daily control, cascading KPIs, performance rituals from pre-start checks to leader-in-field routines, meeting governance with a central meetings database, short-interval control, the eight active-management behaviors, structured problem-solving, daily and weekly operating reports, a skills matrix with a 51-document job-description bank, and digital enablement. Fifty-eight SIPOCs mapped the stakeholder areas, a permanent war room at the mine camp hosted a daily Proudfoot-coached stand-up for the earthworks contractors, and every deliverable was produced in English and French. A national host-country improvement taskforce was recruited, bootcamped and certified to own the system, with host-country experts co-presenting each element alongside consultants.

At handover, eighteen areas had the operating system in place with 100% departmental ownership claimed, and weekly bulk-earthworks output had lifted roughly elevenfold over the period as the integrated planning process took hold with the lead contractor. Eight client team members were certified as champions, seventy managers were trained on the behaviors, and a second champion cohort was already running at close, supported by a smartphone health-check audit tool, a tested new-area implementation pack and a four-month rolling champion curriculum that together gave the client a self-sustaining replication capability.

A historic North American public transit authority operates one of its busiest light-rail lines, carrying more than 150,000 people a day. At the car house responsible for preventative work, heavy repair and benchwork, workloads were rising, material costs were high and management practices had not kept pace. Supervisors lacked standardized processes after years of entrenched culture, communication between shifts was weak, and no consistent management tools existed.

Proudfoot deployed a team of change-management, people-solutions and lean specialists. A four-week rapid analytics phase used proprietary assessment tools to guide the creation of a Lean Council to plan, implement and measure improvement. The team then worked with forepeople to identify pain points and install the missing tools: a skills matrix for workforce deployment, a safety-walk checklist, a parts-request tool for non-inventory parts and a behavior model for performance feedback.

5S workspace organization, car-level visual management boards and parts tracking systems followed. Decades of entrenched practice had meant no standardization, driving excessive overtime, high material cost and unavailable parts. Forepeople were empowered to take responsibility, materials were tracked systematically and shift handovers standardized. The work projected first-year savings of around half a million to nearly one million dollars, a 1.1 million dollar reduction in annual material cost, and overtime cut from 22% to 19% of wages, shifting the culture from reactive to proactive.

A large mining company in Mongolia was extending its processing plant capacity through an engineering firm and a construction company. The project was plagued by problems and delays, putting it at risk of missing a major milestone, the processing plant shutdown. Proudfoot was engaged six months before the shutdown to assess the situation and work alongside the engineering firm, the construction company and the mine’s staff to ensure timely completion of the key construction activities.

Proudfoot partnered with the client and completed a rapid assessment of the situation, risks and opportunities to improve. The team then implemented more than 100 improvements across organization, planning and supervisory effectiveness, provided training and coaching to all supervisors, and designed a perfect-shift model to increase tool time. A Management Operating System focused on the planning process was developed and installed to hold the gains.

The effect on execution was immediate. Tool time per shift rose 20% and schedule attainment improved by roughly 33 percentage points, climbing from around 60% to around 80%. Construction activities were brought back onto the program, and the critical work was completed in time for the milestone plant shutdown, the outcome the whole engagement had been mobilized to protect.

A large North American iron-ore producer operating an integrated mine-to-port value chain was under sustained pressure to make its performance more predictable. Production was volatile, the pilot mine’s best month reached roughly 730k tonnes against an average near 525k, and the operation fell into a recurring pattern of chasing the plan in the fourth quarter. Decisions leaned on judgement rather than a single trusted view of priorities, and there was no way to test scheduling or recovery scenarios before committing to them. The client needed two questions answered before funding a multi-year transformation: could a dynamic model built on its own data be trusted, and was the operation ready to act on one?

Proudfoot delivered the answer as two integrated workstreams under one close-out. A specialist technology partner built a dynamic value-stream model of the pilot mine from roughly 8.5 months of actual operating data, applying constraint logic and simulation to produce backward-looking and forward-looking views with a disruption-recovery workflow, formally validated against actuals. A parallel data-maturity assessment found almost 50% of data sources not yet model-ready, cataloguing twelve specific issues from unreconciled stockpile values to plans held in spreadsheets. Alongside it, Proudfoot ran a three-dimensional operational assessment: the full management operating system reviewed element by element, nine active-management behaviors scored on a five-level maturity scale with observational evidence, and an eleven-indicator short-interval-control review. The complete meeting cadence was mapped from shift level to executive governance, exposing meetings without terms of reference, KPIs or action logs, and gray areas over decision authority between the remote operations center and the mine.

Six named executives’ expectations were captured at the start and traced to delivery at close-out, where the findings converted into an eight-month transformation roadmap spanning the mine and its rail and port nodes, with the data-readiness plan, the behavioural baseline and the validated model as its foundations. User-acceptance testing and modeling training transferred the tool’s operation to client personnel.

A diversified global mining major operating a large open-pit copper operation in Asia-Pacific, the same complex where the firm was concurrently running a technical-services proof-of-concept, was significantly underperforming in its open-pit area, running around 27% below plan against an annual target of roughly 53.5 million tonnes. The site chief operating officer set out two priorities: getting the right tonnes delivered, and closing the gap between planning and execution. Because the site already had an active engagement under a master services agreement, the walkthrough was contracted as an extension to it, with a one-week pause of the concurrent work to free the on-site team.

Proudfoot delivered a five-day on-site scoping walkthrough with a four-person team supported by two co-invested remote partners. The diagnostic used three reinforcing methods: structured manager interviews with an embedded 13-row operating-system checklist scoring each element on whether it exists, is used and is effective; three supervisory time-and-task observation studies with minute-by-minute categorisation; and a site walkthrough. The team built a single-point business case around a 10% throughput-recovery target, sizing roughly 8.5 million tonnes a year worth around $14.9M a year in contribution margin.

The supervisory observations produced the most striking evidence: proactive supervision at 0-5% against a 20% target, administration at 41-55% against a 30% target, and around 80% of personnel not actively working at the formal shift-start meeting in one observed area. The team produced an integrated five-workstream implementation design and, when it stalled, re-priced it as a focused quick-wins variant. The walkthrough itself was a profitable engagement under the active master services agreement, with its methodological contributions durable regardless of the next phase’s outcome.

A diversified global mining major operating one of the largest underground copper mining and concentration complexes in Asia-Pacific had a high-performing operations team but a technical-services and growth division struggling to deliver consistent, plan-aligned output to its internal customer. This is a knowledge-work function whose product is technical advice, plans, models and designs rather than tonnes. The division had 18 distinct sub-teams, and a complex fly-in/fly-out roster made handover quality a constraint on reliability. The client wanted to test, in a 16-week proof-of-concept, whether the operating system could work here and serve as the template for wider rollout.

Proudfoot delivered a four-phase proof-of-concept covering discovery, design, implementation and audit. Discovery used 21 stakeholder interviews, 21 meeting-effectiveness assessments in place of shop-floor observation, and nine maturity assessments. Design introduced bottom-up KPIs recommended by sub-team leaders themselves, the single strongest adoption driver, a daily walk-out review tool with an embedded procedure, and a 78-page playbook consolidating 16 operating-system-on-a-page diagrams. Implementation installed daily short interval control and weekly performance management, and trained 24 supervisors and managers across six bilingual sessions on an eight-module program.

Plan-versus-actual tracking was installed at sub-team level for the first time, documented by sub-team leaders as a major advantage, and same-day bilingual translation was achieved by the second half of the engagement, improving from a three-day lag. Embedded client team members were coached into the consulting role to enable sustainability, and a defensible 1,342-hour embedding-and-sustaining schedule was tabled for the next phase. The repeat opportunity closed through the same senior client, who re-engaged the firm at an adjacent division after a role change.

A large enterprise-scale underground mining operation in a remote desert geography was running a multi-billion-dollar concentrator upgrade. The commercial topology was unusual: the asset owner contracted an engineering and construction-management firm as the paying client, which in turn subcontracted the structural, mechanical, piping, electrical and instrumentation works to a foreign cost-plus subcontractor. The productivity gains the firm was paid to deliver had to materialise inside the subcontractor’s workforce, yet the cost-plus structure created a perverse incentive at exactly that point. A multi-party blame culture had taken hold, value-add work was running at around five hours per twelve-hour shift, the workforce spoke three languages, and a critical shutdown was at risk.

Proudfoot structured the work as a four-phase probe-and-extend engagement, each phase optioned only after the prior phase’s findings landed. Phase 1 was a gap assessment that was structurally a full diagnostic. Phase 2 deployed a capital-construction operating-system variant, an 11-element framework plus a 62-slide deployable operating manual, and paired each subcontractor superintendent 1:1 with an engineering subject-matter expert, with a three-week look-ahead and a jointly signed one-week lock as the operating cadence. The eight active-management-behavior program was delivered in all three site languages, with in-house trainers taking ownership of the toolkit.

Across the engagement, 168 coaching moments reached 95% of the target population, and the joint sign-off discipline identified and corrected more than 350 scheduling issues. Plan attainment rose from 60% to 81.2%, meeting effectiveness lifted from 40% to 90%, and the critical shutdown completed on time, on the ninth or tenth engagement of a multi-decade stewarded account, with the methodology handed to the subcontractor’s own team to sustain.

A leading organization in metals and mining faced challenges in aligning its metrics with operational goals, as real-time operational-control metrics showed inconsistencies in quality and responsiveness. Fragmented data sources, a lack of ownership across teams and inconsistent KPI tracking led to delays in decision making, low machine utilization and reduced confidence in metric-driven action. The chief executive required Proudfoot’s support to analyze, define and implement a centralised process to uplift the operations-center metrics across functional areas and teams.

Proudfoot implemented a comprehensive metrics and operating-system uplift across six dimensions. It aligned the organization by defining clear roles and responsibilities for metric ownership and accountability; introduced tiered dashboards and visual boards to focus teams on priority metrics; enhanced planning and control by monitoring and auditing meetings and embedding Short Interval Control and root-cause analysis protocols to address deviations in real time; coached multi-departmental teams from lower to middle management to engage proactively with operations-center data; standardized data collection and trained operators on the impact of accurate reporting; and applied process and dynamic controls to schedule maintenance weeks ahead and prevent unscheduled downtime.

The work delivered measurable, sustained improvement. Unscheduled failures at the mine fell 39.7%, with the rate dropping from 21.78% in week three to 13.13% by week 25, and reduced failures at the regrinds saved $30.8M. As one planner reflected, the work was not just about getting work done, but about balancing cost, opportunity and risk while optimizing performance and service delivery.

A leading European construction contractor was nearing completion of one of the most complex healthcare infrastructure projects ever undertaken in its country: a multi-billion-euro paediatric hospital spanning 160,000 square metres with over 6,000 rooms across seven storeys. The project was significantly behind schedule. At engagement start, only around 300 of 5,728 rooms had reached final sign-off, just over 5% complete, with the final handover deadline approaching. A scoping visit found no plan-versus-actual tracking, inconsistent ways of working across zones, no daily coordination meeting, and inspection return rates between 12% and 20% driven by misaligned acceptance criteria between the contractor and the independent design team.

Proudfoot deployed a two-person team plus senior-partner oversight for an eight-week rapid intervention, designing and installing a construction closeout operating system progressively across zones. A full meeting cadence with terms of reference was established, alongside short interval control comparing planned and actual progress, and a priority planning framework sequencing rooms by inspection readiness and corridor release. The breakthrough deliverable was the first formal coordination meeting between the contractor and the design team, with joint inspection checklists, shared acceptance criteria and collaborative sample inspections that enabled desktop approvals for lower-risk rooms.

BI dashboards specified by Proudfoot and built by the client’s own team were displayed on lobby screens for site-wide visibility. Room sign-offs accelerated from 339 to 1,557 over the engagement, a 4.6-times improvement, and inspection return rates halved from 16% to 8%. A comprehensive closeout report provided a continuation roadmap, and an organic referral to a separate project within the same client group arrived within 15 days of the engagement starting.

A leading German tier-one automotive supplier needed to protect operating margins at a key plant facing declining production volumes and growing competition. The procurement structure was lean, with limited time consumed by supplier quality management and routine annual price reductions, and the potential of best-cost-country suppliers went untapped for lack of resources and infrastructure for global sourcing.

Proudfoot implemented an innovative digital global-sourcing approach using artificial intelligence and big data. The team analyzed spend to identify pilot metal parts, defined the requirements and launched an initial search tapping into millions of data points from hundreds of data sources worldwide. A primarily automated process then narrowed candidates through RFI and RFP stages, giving the team the capability to evaluate exponentially more suppliers with a fraction of the usual effort.

Strategic sourcing was centralised with minimal workload for category managers, and Proudfoot developed the processes and behaviors that let the team focus on value-adding activities. The approach discovered and vetted 20 new qualified suppliers across Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia within weeks rather than months, and delivered up to a 19% reduction in purchase price once manufacturing cost, raw material, overhead, logistics and margin were all factored in, with the final suppliers invited to quote for new and running programs.

Following a major merger, a leading global building-materials company needed a single, integrated system to operate more than 300 assets across 60 countries. The central difficulty was developing one global operating standard for plants that varied widely in age, culture, technology, equipment and performance, where inconsistent standards made performance comparison, knowledge sharing and best-practice deployment impossible.

Proudfoot recommended a bespoke, digital-ready operating model and designed a multi-phase program. The team built best practices for 29 specific topics spanning the entire value chain, covering the technical, operational, financial, commercial and organisational challenges these businesses face, and developed a four-category maturity assessment to benchmark each plant. A select client team was engaged on both the technical content and the Proudfoot methodology, combining analytical assessment with transformation through people.

To deploy at scale, Proudfoot trained, coached and certified seven regional improvement teams and a global central expert team to run the rollout and future upgrades themselves. Pilots validated benefits across seven regions before full rollout. The model delivered a $4 per ton reduction in cash cost and an 11% reduction in working capital, and left the client with the internal capability to extend it to more than 300 plants over two years, the one-to-many principle in action.

A leading industrial packaging manufacturer was losing millions a year in wasted tin, steel and coating at a key facility making metal packaging for household-name brands. Extreme scrap levels were undermining profitability. The chief executive, who knew Proudfoot from a prior engagement, wanted quick wins within weeks and a long-term solution, with a target of saving almost one million dollars a year, achieved in five weeks.

Aerial Mapping examined the operation from every angle to illuminate the gaps between people, processes, management tools and technology, engaging the plant manager, business unit leaders, supervisors, operators, coaters, stackers and forklift drivers, everyone who affects scrap at the point of execution. A waste-point validation study, failure modes and effects analysis and A3 analysis identified the top 20 causes of scrap and 60 improvement opportunities. The root causes lay in process, not equipment, and operators lacked clear guidelines for escalating scrap events.

The team installed visible scrap metrics with results tracking, gave operators clear corrective-action and escalation guidelines, and coached personnel on the new processes. Monthly scrap cost fell 22% within five weeks, 35% beyond the goal, delivering $1.2M in annual savings, with capture beginning before the engagement had even finished. Operators began pointing out opportunities themselves, and the success drove expansion to further facilities.

The head of maintenance at a leading international underground metro operator needed to increase maintenance time during non-traffic hours and lift infrastructure work while keeping safety excellent. An internal initiative to use those hours better had met shop-floor resistance, and change leadership was needed to win the hearts and minds of everyone from traffic control to engineers.

Proudfoot ran a three-week rapid assessment across two representative lines, covering possession and resource planning, non-traffic-hours utilization and maintenance productivity. Aerial Mapping and analytics focused on standards, workload forecasting, possession scheduling and safe execution. The findings were stark: 60% of non-traffic-hours time was non-value-added, because safety protocols, the possession process, interface management and behaviors were not coordinated, and earlier internal attempts had failed by tackling scheduling without addressing culture.

The team built a phased transformation roadmap addressing both structural and cultural issues, covering standards, scheduling, communication, engagement, education, training and coaching, with rapid prototyping of the capabilities and behaviors required. The result was 60 additional productive minutes per day during non-traffic hours, a 25 to 30% increase in effective maintenance time, 35 to 40% more maintenance work, an equivalent 120 days of additional line availability per line, and a 30% compression of major-project cycle time, all delivered safely.

A leading national overnight courier wanted to dramatically improve performance, but despite the daily effort of a committed workforce its management operating systems were not delivering. Supervisors were reacting to daily stresses rather than proactively managing productivity and cost, and the company needed fast, lasting change to its workplace culture and behavior.

Proudfoot focused on how work was completed, managed and measured, with no new equipment or capital spend. A top-to-bottom review covered staff productivity, supervisory capability and leadership across 87 depots, 45 transport hubs and 2 contact centers. The existing system was not driving results because supervisors lacked the forecasting tools to match crew to variable workloads.

The team designed a new Management Operating System with forecasting and crewing tools, resource requirement models to balance dock resources and minimize under-loading on route, and a courier best-practice model to lift stops per hour and improve service. Workers helped design the productivity models at depots and hubs, managers were coached to own their problems, and formalised capability reviews with weekly action plans tackled underperforming terminals. After a successful pilot across six depots and a main hub, the model rolled out nationally, delivering a 12% productivity increase and $12M in reduced labor costs with no capital outlay, alongside a lasting culture of continuous improvement.

A leading tier-one automotive supplier under constant OEM cost pressure had diversified manufacturing across the globe and sourced raw materials internationally. That lowered negotiated unit costs but multiplied supply chain complexity. Weak material planning led to stockouts, which were masked by raising safety stock, which in turn inflated working capital. The planning function spent its time expediting orders and firefighting rather than managing a smooth flow of information.

Proudfoot engaged leaders at every level to drive behavior change at the root causes. The team built a scientific safety-stock analysis and reduction plan, paired with a behavior model that empowered material planners to make better real-time decisions as demand fluctuated. Central planning processes and problem-solving were standardized, demand-smoothing methodologies designed and supplier lead times reviewed.

A warehouse master schedule was installed with clear work standards, and a process was created to claim unused material costs back from OEMs, supported by advanced data modeling to evaluate supply chain costs and risks. Planners moved from reactive expediting to proactive demand management on data-driven stock levels. Safety stock fell 33%, working capital dropped 11%, material investment reduced 25%, the order cycle time shortened by two and a half months, and eight full-time roles were released from the warehouse.

A luxury automotive interior-components manufacturer, supplying premium car brands, faced growing backlogs on several lines. A recent audit showed it was missing productivity targets and generating too much scrap, and the lines with the greatest demand were falling furthest behind. Supervisors lacked the tools to track performance, struggled to manage resources during absences or bottlenecks, and communicated poorly between shifts, while scrap drove up costs.

Proudfoot ran a top-to-bottom analysis on site to understand how things actually worked rather than how they were meant to, working in three languages to reach the whole workforce. The team developed perfect-day scenarios showing supervisors what optimal performance looked like, focusing on productivity rather than just volume. A pilot on three focus lines implemented visual performance management, Short Interval Control checks, real-time quality checklists, workforce deployment tools and daily requirements analysis.

Start and end-of-shift meetings reduced handover issues, management ran line walks and daily reviews, and coaching reinforced standards and PPE use. Supervisors gained insight into bottlenecks and low performers, and productivity and quality were tracked in real time. By week six the work delivered a 20% productivity increase, double the original 10% target, and a 27% scrap reduction. The gains held after a three-week shutdown, and the tools were rolled out across the facility ahead of a global rollout.

A major Alaskan seafood processor faced a sharp rise in the state minimum wage on top of a tough labor environment, with a limited local talent pool, seasonal staffing needs and high travel, food and lodging costs for non-local workers. Unable to pass rising costs to customers, it urgently needed to improve efficiency. The chief executive had a strong vision but wanted an objective third party to help employees speak freely and gather insight from every level.

The chief executive invited Proudfoot after learning of its reputation in the seafood industry. Aerial Mapping constructed a detailed, unfiltered picture of handoffs across the business, and the team built a transformation plan addressing ERP utilization, labor utilization, overtime, maintenance efficiency and supervisor upskilling. The ERP system was underused, supervisors lacked tools, and there were planning gaps between teams.

Active-management tools gave leadership visibility of where problems originated and which levers to pull, better planning created virtuous cycles between teams, and the ERP system was reviewed through a human lens based on how the work really gets done. On-the-floor coaching embedded the new behaviors, leadership replaced firefighting with a longer-term focus, and people took ownership of the results. The work delivered $5.2M in annualised benefits by year-end, a 21% productivity increase, a 34% reduction in the downgrade rate and improved ERP utilization.

A major Canadian airline was grappling with aircraft-on-ground occurrences that disrupted flight schedules, frustrated passengers and pushed up costs. The root cause was ineffective planning and misalignment between three critical functions: line maintenance, maintenance planning and the System Operations Control team. These groups operated without integrated visibility or coordination, which left maintenance reactive rather than preventive.

Proudfoot implemented a Maintenance Operating System designed to integrate the three functions seamlessly. The system gave real-time visibility of aircraft availability, schedules and resource allocation, replacing guesswork with clear coordination and enabling proactive planning. A locked-aircraft program was established, designating specific tail numbers for scheduled, systematic maintenance cycles with parts and tools staged 72 hours in advance. The roll-out focused on the main stations, with choices guided by fleet size, operational importance and historical aircraft-on-ground data.

The results followed quickly: a 5% decrease in aircraft-on-ground incidents per active aircraft, an 11% improvement in overall maintenance performance and an 8% increase in the defect resolution rate. Beyond the numbers, the airline gained an integrated operating system across three functions that had previously worked in isolation, and a 72-hour advance planning capability that turned firefighting into systematic, preventive maintenance.

A major mining company needed to improve performance and reduce operating costs at a copper mine in Indonesia. Changing economic conditions and falling demand had pressured copper prices, and the company needed to re-establish profitability. Previous investments in new technology and training had not hit their targets on recovery and production tonnes.

Proudfoot worked closely with local managers to identify the issues and develop solutions. The technology and training had underdelivered because they did not address the underlying management system and behaviors, and inconsistencies across shifts and crews were driving production variance. A customised Management Operating System was designed and implemented for data-driven decision-making and Active Management Behaviours, and a new training program reached operators, supervisors and managers with real-time application and coaching.

People were empowered to eliminate cross-shift inconsistencies, improve operating efficiency, reduce mechanical downtime and improve safety, with variance management embedded in daily routines and a sitewide improvement team trained for continuity. The work delivered $42.5M of first-year annualised benefits, a 20% increase in daily ore throughput with no extra capital, and results 25% above the financial target, recovering profitability through operational excellence rather than fresh investment.

A major European flag-carrier airline set out to cut work accidents by 30% over two years across ground operations at four sites. Financial trends were positive, but safety incidents causing staff absence were rising, hurting operational efficiency and putting reputation at risk.

Proudfoot reviewed on-the-floor safety protocols, the central security department and the accident-treatment process. Detailed ramp observations revealed high safety awareness among workers but insufficient management involvement at the point of execution. Supervisors were not detecting risks effectively, reporting systems were weak, and certain behavior patterns recurred during ramp work.

The team installed a safety management system with tools to prevent, detect and correct unsafe situations, clarified roles and responsibilities, and set floor-control checklists. Crucially, coaching was delivered on the runways and ramps rather than in a classroom, reinforcing best practice in the working environment and changing behavior where the work actually happens. Accident frequency fell 30% year on year, PPE non-conformity dropped from 10% to 2%, and the pilot site cut runway accidents by 50%. Because the change was behavior-led and built into the daily management routine, the improvement was set up to last rather than fade once attention moved on.

At a major European international airport, four stakeholders, the airport authority, the national carrier, the main ground-handling organization and the immigration function, had formed an executive committee to tackle 43 operational issues. Despite setting up workforce teams, they could not generate speed or momentum. The committee hired Proudfoot to evaluate the program and accelerate it, targeting lost luggage, transit time, baggage capacity, on-time departures, turnaround times and customer service.

Proudfoot ran two parallel activities: evaluating the status of the 43 initiatives and assessing each organization’s operational management maturity. The findings were clear: coordinating four organizations with different interests and cultures was a major challenge, the tools to manage the complexity did not exist, poor resource distribution hurt service, and inefficient baggage handling drove a high lost-luggage rate.

The team implemented a project management office, daily debriefings in the luggage and passenger areas, clarified roles and responsibilities, standardized processes across units and introduced a continuous-improvement system, with coaching to build cross-functional communication. The work created a unified operational rhythm across four independent organizations and delivered a 43% reduction in lost baggage worth $3.9M annualised and a 28% improvement in on-time departures worth $6.1M annualised, a $10M total.

A major full-service network airline needed a complete management operating system across its in-house line-maintenance organization, installed simultaneously at three principal hub stations. Wrench time measured just 34% at the lead hub, aircraft-on-ground events kept disrupting the flying schedule, deferred-defect volumes were growing, and the maintenance schedule was routinely broken by last-minute changes. The environment added complexity rarely seen in manufacturing: a regulated airworthiness regime, 24/7 shift patterns, and deep dependencies across operations control, planning, logistics, tooling, stores and engineering.

Proudfoot ran a six-sprint design-then-install program. The complete operating model, forecast, plan, execute, report, was designed first and codified into a 71-page playbook, then installed through a five-workshop training program reaching directors, general managers, operations managers and team leaders. The centrepiece was a maintenance-specific short-interval-control system locking selected aircraft on a 72, 48, 24 and 6-hour countdown, with standardized daily call scripts, a defined escalation path with named decision-makers, and formal drop criteria for irregular operations. Ten meeting cadences were installed, each built on a preparation, meeting and follow-up discipline, alongside a KPI driver tree feeding a live dashboard. Mid-engagement the team moved wrench-time measurement from observation studies to an earned-value method better suited to ongoing operation, and 1,435 broken-work and concession events were analyzed to drive variance elimination.

Nine of the ten operating-system elements were fully implemented across all three stations. At final quality review the deferred-defect rate target had been hit, aircraft-on-ground events were down and better managed, plan attainment was up and dropped work was down. Perfect-day schedules gave four leadership layers an explicit hour-by-hour management cadence, operating-system maturity was tracked per element, per station and per individual, and a tapered sustainability phase transferred ownership to client coaches, supported by the playbook as the master reference.

An 8-bay aircraft base-maintenance facility serving a mix of carrier fleets was failing to reliably hit its core profitability KPI: density, the productive manhours charged per active bay day. The target of 250 was not being consistently achieved against a baseline around 214, and the management system Proudfoot had installed years earlier had drifted. Six different methods were in use to calculate planned density, so the KPI meant different things to different people; meetings ran passively without terms of reference, materials delays were the leading cause of turnaround overrun, and a sophisticated digital performance platform was undermined by defects and inconsistent use.

A three-week embedded diagnostic, observation studies, meeting-effectiveness scoring, an end-to-end value-stream critique and a full operating-system maturity assessment, sized the drift. The team then rebuilt the system in two workstreams. Preparation gained a standardized countdown schedule with critical milestones, three new handover meetings covering the commercial-to-operational transition, and the foundational fix: one standardized planned-density calculation trained to every planner. Execution gained an 11-meeting layover-lifecycle architecture with full terms of reference and documented coaching points for seven meeting types, a perfect-bay-day and perfect-bay-week defining time-slotted responsibilities for bay managers, short-interval control run as a structured daily bay walk, and a plan-actual-variance-root-cause routine with translated problem-solving tools. Rather than building new technology, the team fixed and re-leveraged the client’s existing performance platform, with the meeting cadence redesigned around it. An eight-habits supervisory program carried the active-management behaviors to all bay managers.

Density rose past the target within the engagement window, reaching 271 in November and higher month-to-date in the closing weeks, and the year closed at 100% density-target and budget attainment. A five-stage coaching handover, assessment, design, coaching, handing over, sustainability, transferred the system to the site’s own continuous-improvement team, supported by a 67-slide playbook, a 20-tool template index and two sustainability audit instruments.

A major global aircraft MRO operator was struggling to improve operational efficiency in its aircraft base maintenance at one of its European locations. Productivity was low, which left margins low. Proudfoot was brought in to upgrade the Management Operating System and the shopfloor management system to increase productivity. Having developed and implemented the shopfloor management system years earlier, it was now time for a digital upgrade.

Proudfoot started with a rapid assessment of the status quo, then worked with the client to improve planning and preparation as well as shopfloor routines during the aircraft layover, while building internal competencies for further continuous improvement. Five workstreams were implemented. The first optimized handovers from sales to planning and operations, defining terms of reference for critical milestone meetings to ensure information flowed smoothly between phases. The second increased transparency over the status of the aircraft layover, clarifying activities and responsibilities across the value chain. The third improved meeting effectiveness through a new operating system with a standardized weekly cadence. The fourth standardized and measured manpower utilization, defining a standard methodology to track performance. The fifth implemented a perfect-day model for bay managers to structure their daily routines.

The work delivered the strongest possible operational outcome: 100% attainment of the manpower-utilization target and 100% attainment of the 2025 budget. The shopfloor management system was digitally upgraded, bay managers operated to structured routines, and cooperation, accountability and transparency improved along the value chain, met consistently and sustainably.

A major global mining and energy company was executing a multi-billion-dollar, decade-long program to retrofit a hydroelectric generating station built in the early twentieth century. The program spanned the replacement of eight turbine-alternator groups plus building, valve and spillway works, and involved a complex multi-party structure: the asset owner, a major engineering and project-services provider, and more than five specialist contractors, each with their own systems and maturity. Proudfoot had previously deployed its construction operating system at the same owner’s adjacent smelter project, achieving a sustained performance-factor improvement above 30%, and the general manager responsible for both sites wanted the same discipline at the larger program.

A three-week diagnostic with 23 leadership interviews across the three organizations established the baseline, finding misaligned roles, no standardized lookahead planning, and gaps in real-time progress monitoring. The team designed and progressively deployed a multi-party construction operating system, structured as rolling phases of more work. A bespoke digital coordination center was built on a major cloud platform with more than 10 functional modules covering task management, frontline issue resolution, critical-risk tracking and live dashboards, deployed across three physical locations.

Seven formal meeting structures were installed across yearly through to shift horizons, each with terms of reference. Contractor onboarding ran on a rolling basis using a staged “rational buy-in to ownership” model, and weekly active-management-behavior assessments were conducted at individual supervisor level. Nine of ten operating-system elements were implemented, the adjacent smelter site was retrofitted concurrently to prove the replication model, and a portable deployment pack was built for rollout across the owner’s future sites, all delivered fully bilingually.

Leaders at a major gold mine and a regional equipment dealership both struggled with component rebuild cycle time and maintenance cost. For the dealership, long cycle times drove overtime and expedited freight; for the mine, equipment shortages slowed the ramp-up. The numbers told the story: 62% of open work orders were older than 50 days, the longest at 398 days, with no standard repair time defined by either company.

A holistic assessment confirmed the known challenges and, more importantly, surfaced the root causes by engaging both companies in the analysis together. That broke the adversarial dynamic and made both parties owners of the solution. A three-way team designed a joint Management Operating System and target operating model covering equipment usage optimization, a master schedule between technical services and logistics, an attainment performance model spanning rotables maintenance and procurement, toll-date performance meetings, and streamlined invoicing.

Site-based coaching developed the continuous-improvement teams into Champions of Change so the gains would hold. Rebuild cycle time fell 45%, billable technician productivity rose 50% and overtime dropped 20%, releasing fleet availability straight back into mine production and, as the dealership’s leadership noted, leaving the two organizations with a stronger relationship than before.

The chief executive and site leadership of a major gold mining operation were dissatisfied with an extended plant ramp-up. The autoclaves looked like the bottleneck, but contributing causes came from upstream in the mine, and mine and plant were not coordinating. An approaching lender’s test added pressure, since hitting the milestones would cut interest costs. Many shifts were beating plan but the majority were not, pulling average tonnes per day below target, and variable sulphur content was affecting autoclave performance.

The insight was that variability, not average capacity, was the real constraint. Having worked with Proudfoot before, the chief executive formed a joint site-level team providing project management, process improvement, operating-system design, skills development and change management. Four concurrent cross-departmental teams attacked the problem: ore-feed control through blending and sulphur stabilization; upstream operations including crushing, grinding and autoclave optimization; asset management and maintenance planning for equipment reliability; and a support team for supervisor and manager skills.

The teams developed an ore-blending recipe book, implemented KPIs and Short Interval Controls, and ran bilingual training to support the move from expatriates to nationals. The work delivered $53M annualised at margin and a 17% increase in tonnes per day in six months, removed the autoclave bottleneck and passed the lender’s test, with each 1% of throughput worth more than $8.7M in margin.

A major international rail network owner faced intense financial pressure and needed dramatic maintenance cost reduction. The maintenance infrastructure was outsourced across seven vendors and had become too large and unwieldy to manage, spanning signalling, track, the control center, mechanical and electrical, telecoms and work-train maintenance. The objective was to increase network and rolling-stock availability while cutting cost. The assessment found no effective maintenance operating system, with inadequate forecasting, planning, reporting and measurement, late procurement decisions causing delays, an absence of Active Management Behaviours, poor communication with no interdepartmental meetings, and standards that were either non-existent or not followed.

Detailed Aerial Mapping identified the key issues, and Proudfoot worked closely with the client’s people to design and install a maintenance operating system covering tools, controls, resource scheduling, reporting, briefings and review meetings, anchored by a dedicated planning control room. Work practices were overhauled to remove non-value-adding activity, separate workstreams embedded new processes area by area, and initiatives were drawn from employees’ own suggestions. Safety was built into the approach, and the team worked successfully with local teams and unions, overcoming resistance by demonstrating the benefits, while specialist People Solutions teams secured lasting cultural change.

Improved visibility and control maximized shift saturation and replaced firefighting with proactive management. Available maintenance time rose 8% and 54 full-time roles, the equivalent of 26% of the workforce, were freed up for other projects, with 310 employees coached and sustainable results delivered in ten months.

A major iron ore producer was getting inconsistent results at its largest operation, falling short of critical targets. Management had already put new digital monitoring solutions in place but still ran below guidance, with problems stretching across the pit-to-port chain. Familiar with Proudfoot’s ability to engage people quickly and design effective solutions, the executive team re-engaged the firm to assess the value chain.

Proudfoot engaged everyone from leadership to operators to build and install a target operating model that managed variability from pit to port. The insight was that the digital tools were already there; the constraint lay in how people used the data and coordinated across the chain. The model combined global optimization with local de-bottlenecking, identifying the most significant constraints at the system level and addressing them locally.

Working with site management, the team coordinated planning across mine, concentrator, rail and port, compressed scheduled downtime and maintenance turnarounds, and optimized the rail network for total capacity. Agile project management kept the focus on the highest-impact points first. The result was a 20% production increase with zero capital expenditure, running 7% above target, a 19% rise in rail tonnes delivered and a 10% reduction in rail cycle time, all from operational improvement rather than new investment.

A major iron-ore producer operating a vertically integrated mining and processing complex had invested in an enterprise maintenance-management system and a corporate maturity framework, but the system was not being used effectively. A 46-topic maintenance maturity audit scored the site at 1.4 out of 5.0. Outstanding notifications routinely exceeded 120, backlog hours ran at 3,000-3,500, and materials outages disrupted 30% of scheduled work. The capacity-loading tools had never been activated. The client believed it needed coaching for performance. Critically, the firm did not know it was being benchmarked against a competitor already on site, and had been told there would be no follow-on work.

Proudfoot determined the site was not ready for performance coaching and pivoted to a preparing-for-performance methodology, building foundational system capability first. The operating system was built directly on the client’s own maintenance system rather than alongside it: dormant modules were activated, data cleansed, operational policies established, and a full meeting architecture installed across both areas with minute-by-minute agendas. The decision to adapt the client’s own maturity framework rather than impose the firm’s tools, despite the commercial risk of appearing non-compliant, ultimately differentiated the firm.

Supervisors, planners and superintendents were coached to proficiency using the client’s 46-topic audit as the measurement instrument, tracked weekly across five role groups. Maturity doubled from 1.4 to 2.8 against a 1.8-2.0 target. Outstanding notifications fell from 120 to below 3, backlog from 3,500 hours to below 90, and materials disruption from 30% to zero, several of them site records. The firm was declared sole-source consulting vendor, with the engagement growing across six contract extensions and multiple follow-on engagements awarded.

A major North American air-cargo carrier had outgrown its main hub. Volumes were heading past one million kilos a day through a facility designed for less than half that, and despite adding 200 people the operation kept hitting the same wall. Management recognized that processes were too unstable to carry the growth and that simply adding resources would not fix the lack of standardization, while customer service levels had to hold for the business to keep expanding.

Proudfoot ran Aerial Mapping across the hub to find where the processes broke down under higher volumes. Working alongside more than 500 employees on the floor, the team mapped 44 core processes and their interfaces and identified over 400 improvement opportunities, compressing what would normally be twelve months of mapping into six weeks. A Future State workshop set the imperatives: a strong customer experience, clean standardized processes, active management and an operating system built for growth.

A Management Operating System was then designed and installed to give managers the information to control flows, supported by visual boards for dwell time and other parameters. Managers were trained in active supervision and coaching. The result was a 30 to 40% capacity increase without proportional new headcount, and a single roadmap to hold the improvement.

The head of refining for a major oil company faced rising costs at the company’s four largest refineries in the US and Europe, where energy represented around 60% of operating costs. The executive was concerned about a lack of process understanding and control, and believed the focus had to be on people and behaviors as well as technology. A target of 4% energy reduction was set, to be achieved without capital expenditure. Previous initiatives had failed to change the behaviors of the 5,000-person workforce, and processes were complex, inconsistent and not focused on operational excellence.

A joint refineries-and-Proudfoot team performed a rapid assessment of operational effectiveness and energy use, producing a clear business case that led to a joint transformation team. That team developed a common approach to process and energy management, ensuring organisational consistency while respecting local needs and using fact-based analytics to target the highest-potential areas. The work built a cross-facility maturity assessment framework, an integrated road map linking a cross-refinery standard approach with local adjustments, and a people-centric solution that developed supervisor and manager skills, all underpinned by a common blueprint for change.

By enlisting the enthusiasm and knowledge of refinery staff and making employees partners in change, the project achieved more than double its initial target. Energy expenditure fell by EUR 10.5M, energy costs dropped 7 to 11% across the four refineries, well beyond the 4% goal, and 300 people were coached in new ways of working, with the blueprint designed to extend across the wider refinery network.

A market leader in adhesive products for the automotive, industrial and aerospace markets was struggling with its sales processes and systems. Several recent acquisitions had left the organization overly complex, with unclear reporting lines and outdated management systems. The client had worked with Proudfoot in other countries.

Observation and interviews identified three areas to optimize: customer care, product design and development, and sales. The acquisitions had created complexity without integration: there were no standardized customer-care processes, product quality assessments ran as single-track events that added delay, the sales management system was inadequate, sales processes were not formalised, and there was insufficient sales coaching.

Proudfoot designed and implemented an automated customer-care scheduling system with commitment dates, software to scan for complete complaint handling, a multi-tasked quality process flow that parallelised reviews, and a standardized sales operating system that automated the sales funnel with tracking and a best-practice database. Sales teams were coached on relationship-selling skills and the 8 Active Management Behaviours through seminars, role-plays and training. Customer complaints were handled within agreed service levels, quality reviews ran in parallel, and sales performance became visible and manageable. The work delivered $14.2M in savings at a 6.6:1 return, a 62% reduction in customer-care reaction time and a 93% reduction in product-design cycle time.

A medical-devices chief executive had launched an internal cost reduction initiative through lean working teams to combat squeezed margins, but recognized it could not deliver the targeted savings. External help was needed to get the initiative on track by clarifying goals, setting transparent expectations and building a transformation road map. More effective cost reduction was required, making better use of existing resources, while supervisors were stuck in a reactive fix-and-fix-again mode that neglected root causes.

Proudfoot teamed up with the client to get the existing initiative on track. A business review with the in-house team targeted cost reduction, planning and yield optimization, and margin improvement, covering wall-to-wall production, maintenance, planning, procurement, product and packaging, labor and materials across three plants in three countries and four distribution centers. The solution shifted supervisor focus from reactive to proactive: team huddles improved collaboration, long and short-term plans were defined with Short Interval Control driving daily and weekly production, and enhanced plans, controls and shop-floor communications managed a complex SKU portfolio. New KPIs and training upskilled employees, and leadership was coached on transparency and communication.

Rather than replacing the internal lean teams, the work made them effective. The results were broad: overtime fell 80%, purchase prices fell 46% through renegotiation, OEE rose 21%, output rose 18%, productivity rose 10%, freight costs fell 20% and the maintenance backlog fell 50%, with a continuous improvement mindset left in place.

A multi-billion-dollar food producer, grown from a 1940s farmer’s sausage business, had doubled capacity by acquiring a new facility. The new plant had problems at nearly every phase: quality and service suffering, costs rising, high turnover and a disengaged workforce. Inefficient changeovers and sanitation caused excessive downtime, workers repeatedly fixed the same problems, there was no accountability for line performance, and ineffective scheduling interfered with maintenance.

Proudfoot deployed Aerial Mapping across the full operation to find the root causes. The key discovery was that allergen contamination risk was driving full sanitation at every changeover, so the team evaluated ingredients and reordered production run sequences to eliminate contamination risk without frequent sanitation, saving 19 hours a week in changeover time alone. Product Quality Impact Criteria were established per activity and the standard operating procedures restructured.

A leadership model was implemented for transparency and communication, KPIs were created with base performance data for accountability, the facility layout was reconfigured, and daily and weekly huddles introduced. Sanitation time was halved through intelligent sequencing, performance became visible in real time, and an accountability culture took hold. The work delivered $6.3M in cumulative first-year savings, a 16% reduction in cost per hundred pounds, record production that overachieved targets by millions of pounds, a 40% OEE increase and a 20% reduction in machine downtime.

A large multinational food-processing company, facing rising demand for frozen food, wanted to improve overall equipment effectiveness across pizza production sites in several countries. It needed a Management Operating System blueprint that could be applied to every production unit for standardized operations, with the goal of a sustainable OEE increase of at least 5%.

Proudfoot focused on three pizza production sites across two countries, running leadership assessments and business reviews. The findings pointed to weak operating discipline: few standards for supervision, handovers and meetings, with maintenance supervisors and production foremen doing excessive manual work; KPIs on visual boards that were neither clear nor well used; performance variance that did not trigger root-cause analysis; limited inspection and condition-based maintenance; and operators not carrying out first-line maintenance.

After aligning the three sites on shared design principles, a joint team ran a three-week workshop series that drew on the best practice of both the company and Proudfoot. The output was a 13-element MOS blueprint covering change-over standards, maintenance and production Gemba walks, shift handover and reporting, line-level visual performance management, root-cause analysis for both asset reliability and OEE variances, the production-and-cleaning interface, and first-line maintenance. The pilot line gained more than 5% in OEE on a 15-day rolling average and improved raw-material consumption deviation by 30%, returning a positive ROI. With 33 front-line leaders trained, 7 internal coaches developed and other lines adopting the framework of their own accord, the client had a scalable blueprint for rollout across all its international sites.

A significant US gold mine, acquired a few years earlier, was growing but held back by unpredictable performance and poor engagement. Investments had expanded the processing facility and enhanced recovery, but these needed to be fully leveraged from a management perspective, and the workforce needed the capability to resolve root causes and a culture of ownership.

A joint end-to-end assessment covered both the processing plant and mine planning. On the plant side, a lack of Short Interval Control and shutdown planning caused large production-rate swings, mill reliability was low, and only one of seven key process-control parameters hit target more than 60% of the time. In mine planning, plans were inaccurate, there was no executable day-shift schedule, dispatch controllers lacked the skills to guide supervisors, and functions worked in silos.

Proudfoot installed a sitewide Management Operating System across both workstreams. The processing side gained refined process control, Short Interval Control, operator rounds and maintenance shutdown planning. The mine-planning side gained executable plans with compliance tracking, dispatch-controller upskilling and cross-functional coordination, with 100 supervisors and managers trained in active management and coaching. The work delivered more than $7M in annualised benefits, a 3.4% gold recovery improvement, a 6% mill throughput gain, a 14% cost-per-tonne reduction, a 30% haul-fleet productivity increase and schedule compliance rising from 50% to 90% in 16 weeks.

A large high-speed injection-moulding plastics manufacturer had grown through acquisition, leaving inconsistent operating processes across its businesses. The chief executive wanted to reduce total costs while improving delivery through plant consolidation, supply-chain redesign and footprint reduction, with particular emphasis on cutting fixed operating and transportation costs across the network. Better machine utilization was needed to lift production capability and reduce downtime against ambitious growth goals. Management saw the project as critical to the company’s viability and wanted a trusted partner for the long term.

Proudfoot worked alongside the client team on a three-part program: assess, address and achieve. The assess phase analyzed the baseline supply-chain structure and ran optimization models across seven scenarios to find the lowest-cost solution and its next-best alternative. The address phase formulated a consolidation strategy from simulation modeling, optimizing plant layout and reducing freight, supported by a detailed budget road map with clear behavioural steps. The achieve phase adopted standardized processes across all four businesses under a one-company-way model and reduced the footprint from eight plants to four, scrapping 60 machines and relocating 19, with the remaining sites moved onto a single system for scheduling, forecasting and inventory.

The transformation delivered $20m in annualised benefits, including an $8.6m cut in general operating costs and $2.5m in SG&A, alongside a 20% throughput increase, a 52% rise in machine utilization, a 23% finished-goods inventory reduction, a 20% freight reduction and a 50% cut in maintenance backlog, all inside the 150-day plan.

One of the world’s largest producers and recyclers of lead-acid batteries needed to increase throughput and improve productivity in two specific plants. The recycling plant, focused on reverberatory and blast furnaces, suffered from excessive process variation, no standard operating procedures, poor energy management, low equipment availability and excessive downtime; it needed continuous furnace operation for energy efficiency but had seen no active maintenance for years. The distribution center needed to reduce overtime and increase units shipped per labor hour, with rising lead prices making higher tonnage critical.

Proudfoot reviewed operations and performance at both locations. A crucial part of the project was the deployment of People Solutions specialists, who focused on supervisory training in active management through tailor-made coaching programs. Additional Furnace Fundamentals training was developed and rolled out at the recycling plant. The emphasis throughout was on building a data-driven culture in which the management team addressed variances and drove throughput and productivity, with coaching designed to make the improvement self-sustaining after the project closed.

People, not technology or capital, were the lever. Supervisors across both plants were trained in active management, and variance management became a daily discipline. The work delivered $13.8M in financial benefits, with improved customer fill rates, increased throughput and reduced scrap, and it also lowered accidents and blood-lead levels, embedding a culture the client could sustain on its own.

A specialty chemicals company operating lithium processing facilities across North America and South America needed to install the maintenance and reliability operating model designed in a preceding engagement. The lead facility ran at 68.5% overall asset utilization, where a single percentage point was worth roughly $6M a year. Maintenance decisions were made ad hoc with no formal meeting governance, reliability practices such as bad-actor management and root cause analysis were absent or inconsistent, and a parallel deployment to South America added language, cultural and data-system barriers.

Proudfoot ran the installation as a co-venture with progressive withdrawal designed in from the start, transferring capability to client supervisors and managers from week one. A six-meeting maintenance and reliability hierarchy was installed, daily safety huddle, daily shift coordination, weekly reliability, weekly staff, weekly backlog management and monthly reliability results, each with formal terms of reference. Day-by-day countdown schedules drove every element from three weeks out to implementation week, and a weekly adoption tracker scored behavior on a four-level maturity curve from mechanical through sustainable. Gatekeeping was installed to protect the locked weekly schedule, with individual compliance tracked, and the full active-management-behaviors workshop was delivered alongside daily side-by-side coaching. Spanish-language materials and governance were prepared in parallel for the South American site.

By week 13 the site had reached 75% operating-system adoption, all six meetings were running, gatekeeping compliance stood at 92% and planned-maintenance meeting compliance at 83%. When the lithium price collapsed by around 80% in a single week, the client halted all external programs as part of immediate cost cutting, an outcome unrelated to performance. The installed operating system, the adoption tracker and the trained client team remained with the site through an orderly handover.

A leading manufacturer of structural steel products for the transport-infrastructure market needed to increase productivity, reduce cycle time, standardize and simplify processes and improve management skills across operations to lift financial results. The company lacked standardized processes and measurement. After several iterations of management and attempts at restructuring, new leadership had built positive momentum in safety, quality and future-state planning, but still lacked mature operational processes, systems and team support. A significant revenue miss against budget created urgency for rapid improvement.

Proudfoot partnered with the client to develop an improvement road map quickly, using a co-venture method with the plant manager and his team over a 16-week engagement. The project implemented 17 improvements at once: estimating improvements aligned with the plant; planning and scheduling enhancements through better job logging, technology and training; a management control system for consumables, PPE and tools; improvements to the maintenance, repair and operations process; and a 6S program covering training, selection, design, testing and implementation. Every initiative was rolled out across workforce, supervisors and management with active management behaviour coaching.

The results came fast: a 10% productivity increase, a 20% reduction in cycle time and a 15% improvement in quality within 16 weeks. As the chief operating officer and plant director put it, the partnership returned the operation to its performance levels far more quickly than the team could have managed alone, leaving the new management team equipped to deliver from there.

The chief executive of a top vitamin-supplements supplier wanted greater transparency and better decision making, with the main focus on improving forecasting and balancing supply with demand, which had driven an excess inventory trend. The supply chain operated in silos that caused poor planning and excess overtime, and workarounds, rework and poor scheduling created significant delays.

Proudfoot worked together with the client team to design and install daily schedule control with defined assignments and performance standards for each shift. Operational systems and tools were implemented, including robust planning, scheduling, Short Interval Control and reporting, and daily and weekly operating reports gave management far greater visibility. Formal sales-and-operations-planning processes were refined to improve forecasting and supply planning, which reduced inventory and freed working capital. A methodology was developed for strategically assigning employees to the areas that needed support, and supervisors and employees were trained through live one-on-one coaching that aligned behaviors with the new performance expectations.

The engagement balanced supply with demand and established a performance-based culture. Inventory fell 30%, releasing working capital, productivity rose 20%, and cycle times came down, with improved visibility and controls that made the supply-chain functions far more manageable.

A past Proudfoot client, a French bank and insurance mutualist group, engaged the firm to address challenges in a subsidiary division that personalised credit cards and cheque books. The division, running two production sites, had been making a loss for several years, and the mandate was to restore profitability to a positive 10% EBITDA across four focus areas: profitable sales growth, procurement cost reduction, OEE improvement and overhead optimization, all under the constraint of no social unrest, cash neutrality and no net negative impact on the annual budget.

A three-week diagnostic sprint used the Proudfoot System’s agile approach from week one, involving all levels at both sites and identifying improvement opportunities, three-quarters of them with financial benefits. In week three, leadership co-designed a four-sprint co-venture implementation program. Over the following thirteen weeks, workstreams were created for each focus area: sales, with initiatives on invoicing accuracy, systematic price increases and new-customer prospecting; procurement, with more than 20 initiatives and supplier consolidation; OEE, with Short Interval Control monitoring, active management behaviour coaching and demand-and-capacity smoothing; and overhead and external services, reducing IT and building spend and tightening invoicing.

The turnaround took the division from around break-even to a 10% EBITDA in 16 weeks, with sales revenue up 5% and procurement and overhead costs down 5%, all delivered cash-neutral. As the divisional president put it, he was overwhelmed by the results and the changed behaviors of the staff in just sixteen weeks.

The chief executive of a premier European aerospace manufacturer faced two pressures at once: rising customer demand and the use of new materials, set against a shortage of available engineers. A new aircraft was behind schedule and had to be released on time. The company needed a productivity step change across design and development departments spanning more than 900 people worldwide, including 600 engineers at two main sites and more than 300 subcontractors, while avoiding the errors and long lead times that drive cost.

A combined client and Proudfoot team analyzed the R&D functions, project management and every internal and external interface, finding that productive time was being lost to poor interface coordination, reactive issue resolution and weak contractor management rather than any lack of technical capability. The team implemented a step change in project management, applied Short Interval Control to both long and short-term plans, and improved contractor and interface coordination. Engineers and contractors were coached onto the new tools, and cross-border silos were broken down so that more than 900 people worked to common development gates.

The outcome was a 15% performance improvement in R&D, 90 engineers of equivalent capacity gained without recruitment, a 20% cut in overtime, and the aircraft launched on schedule.

A remote primary aluminum smelter needed to lift maintenance and asset-management performance across its carbon value chain, the paste plant, anode baking furnace and anode rodding shop that feed reduction and casting, as part of a group-wide uplift program. On the client’s own maturity framework, work management sat at a 1.30 baseline and structured defect elimination was effectively absent at 0.70. Preventive-maintenance master data had degraded, and a critical production-loss-accounting system carried data-quality problems that undermined reporting.

Proudfoot delivered a 30-week, two-phase implementation organized around four parallel key event schedules: the work-management process, effective cadences, data-driven feedback and defect elimination. Two structured commitment sessions designed the operating systems, settling a four-meeting work-management framework from daily notification review to weekly schedule lock-in, three defect-elimination cadences with nine role profiles, individual coaching checklists for 21 named coachees, and tiered root-cause triggers from 5-Why to statistical methods. A live behavioural dashboard installed in week one put operational and behavioural KPIs in one weekly view. The team ran roughly 500 planned coaching touchpoints across three populations, uplifted preventive-maintenance routines across electrical, mechanical, lubrication and vibration domains, rebuilt the loss-accounting system with migrated reporting, and worked deliberately through the client’s own frameworks and existing systems, including an under-used investigation platform the team adopted and integrated rather than replaced.

By close, work-management maturity had reached 1.82 against a 1.83 target, defect-elimination maturity had risen 3 to 3.5 times across all three carbon areas, and schedule and preventive-maintenance compliance had both climbed from 55% to 75%. Sixty-seven defect investigations were in the pipeline, ten times the baseline, with nine improvement projects in implementation, the anode-reject rate down from 7% to 2%, and an identified defect-elimination benefits pipeline exceeding CA$25M. The engagement closed with a client-authored exit plan, a client-branded process playbook, a digital leave-behind bundle and a client reference letter.

When a leading private-equity firm invested in one of the largest ophthalmology providers in the country, it found year-over-year labor costs outstripping solid clinical growth. The provider, with more than 50 clinics across several states, had grown by acquisition but struggled to integrate systems and controls for site-level demand. Proudfoot was engaged to assess the business, uncover root causes and build a roadmap to control and reduce labor cost in a demand-driven way.

A three-week top-down and bottom-up analysis confirmed the client’s hypotheses and revealed the real levers: acquisition-led growth had created a large estate with no integrated labor management, where each site staffed independently and disconnected from demand. The team then ran a full transformation focused on sustainable labor efficiency through observation and standards-driven rightsizing.

An integrated master scheduling process was installed at practice, regional and organisational levels, supported by proprietary tools, a headcount tracker and master schedules to match labor to demand. Lean concepts were embedded, root-cause corrective action, A3 problem solving, demand leveling and 5S, with workshops for key managers and supervisors, and interviews and observations across more than 30 sites paired with data analysis. The work delivered $4.4M in yearly labor savings, a $3M cumulative P&L impact by year-end, a 33% improvement in call-center accuracy and a 16% reduction in patient cycle time.

A private-equity-backed physician-led medical group operating more than 150 clinics across a major US metropolitan area was underperforming against its operational and financial potential. Primary-care physicians were seeing an average of 14 patients a day against a benchmark of 20. Referral capture to specialty clinics ran below 15%, ambulatory-surgery block utilization was leaking valuable commercial cases to competing hospitals, and over $11M had accumulated in active receivables with no standardized payment-plan policy. The group ran a dual reimbursement model, managing value-based-care and fee-for-service contracts in parallel, with no common operating system across any of its locations.

Proudfoot deployed a five-workstream program across the group’s clinical operations. An accelerated five-week diagnostic used a structured single-visit clinic assessment across more than 10 sites, day-in-the-life observations of four clinical roles, and a cascade economics model that quantified how each 1% improvement in primary-care encounters generated roughly $4.2M of margin across five downstream functions. The team designed a 53-element primary-care operating system covering daily huddles, weekly reviews, visual management and role-specific procedures for every position, alongside a dual value-based-care and fee-for-service KPI framework.

Implementation ran across primary care, referral capture, ambulatory surgery, diagnostic imaging and patient collections. Block-release policy changes lifted surgical-center utilization 15% at two proof-of-concept sites, creating 6,000 new surgical minutes a month. Referral checkout improved from 4% to 66%. A full eight-behavior active-management framework with a five-level maturity model was deployed, and a permanent enterprise program office was designed to sustain the gains.

A private-equity-owned North American manufacturer of labels, sleeves and flexible packaging, with more than 22 production facilities, was underperforming against its potential. EBITDA margins at the six largest plants had stalled around 16%, well below the 25% target the owners had set. Six non-integrated IT systems ran across the network, with no standardized management process. Each plant had developed its own ways of working, producing inconsistent quality, variable lead times and an inability to optimize order routing. A fire-fighting culture meant supervisors spent most of their time reacting rather than managing.

Proudfoot deployed a phased program across all six plants at once. A four-week Value Analysis mapped 102 front-end and production processes using SIPOC inside Aerial Mapping, ran time-and-motion observations at every plant, surveyed around 360 employees on readiness for change, and built a weighted plant-rating model across all 22 sites. The benefits case reached $18.9M across 11 categories, validated by the CFO. A ten-week design phase produced a 22-element Management Operating Process with formal terms of reference for every meeting, from daily production huddles to short interval control and weekly planning.

Installation ran across three waves over 22 weeks, each following a structured five-day training sequence with daily coaching and maturity scoring against a 0-5 scale. Around $7M of EBITDA was realized within ten months, lead times fell on both flexo and digital lines, and a behavioural change workstream embedded the new disciplines plant by plant. The engagement closed out formally at all sites, with a seventh added on an accelerated 13-week schedule.

A privately owned packaged-food manufacturer that had grown through acquisition and product innovation faced a choice: write off its prior investment in a labor-scheduling system and buy new software, or course-correct to realize value from what it already owned. Proudfoot was engaged for a rapid assessment and recommendations to improve labor planning and scheduling across the enterprise.

The team quickly established that the software was capable; the problem was adoption, process integration and stakeholder alignment, not technology. Proudfoot aligned corporate policy owners, business functional owners, plant leadership and IT on the business-process integration points, then used agile program management with rapid prototyping and user testing. More than 300 hourly workers, supervisors and managers were engaged to understand how labor and skills were deployed across shifts and functions.

Labor, training, certification and scheduling processes were re-engineered and standardized, new vacation and time-management policies introduced, and SKU-based labor maps created for each position so planners could baseline capacity and skill requirements accurately. On-the-floor coaching drove adoption. The result was that 92% of employees were auto-scheduled from the production plan on locked two-week rolling schedules, supervisors recovered five hours a week of admin time, 10% of underutilised high-skill labor was redeployed, and new-hire turnover halved, all realizing the original IT ROI without buying new software.

A regional automotive group with more than $15 billion in annual revenue and over 11,000 employees, spanning luxury and mid-market brands, needed consistent, standardized management practices and performance across all dealerships to leverage group resources and deliver its long-term strategy. The target operating model had to be flexible enough to work across different countries and cultures while maintaining standards. The assessment found sales management operating reactively for lack of sales-funnel planning and focus, and Short Interval Control missing in after-sales, which caused ineffective planning and significant lost time.

A joint team developed the most effective operating system for sales and after-sales across all dealerships, with analysis covering the management of the sales funnel, HR, after-sales operations and sales-and-operations planning. Standardized processes and behaviors were developed for resource forecasting, planning and reporting, designed to be flexible across five countries while holding to common standards. All supervisors were mentored on sales management skills, and sales teams were trained on improved selling capabilities and coached on the behaviors needed to execute the new plans. A pilot was run in two countries before roll-out across all of them.

The work delivered a commercial and an operational result together: sales-funnel conversion rose 7% with an overall volume uplift, after-sales overtime cost fell 50% and after-sales technician productivity rose 15%, all underpinned by consistent management practices across five countries and more than 11,000 employees.

A market-leading manufacturer of adhesive products serving the automotive, industrial and aerospace sectors wanted to create a world-class manufacturing unit. Its objectives ranged across improving productivity, eliminating rejects, waste and scrap, optimizing inventory, increasing sales and marketing effectiveness, defining internal customer service levels and developing training. The review found a lack of control over the weekly production plan causing inconsistent output and downtime, erratic quality control driving high scrap and rejects, a weak operating system without KPIs that fostered a blame culture and firefighting, and no structured sales system, which left cash management and customer relations poor.

On the operations side, the team implemented tracking logs for process controls and measurement tools across production, pre-weigh, planning, quality control, warehouse and sales, building a robust functional operating system. Frontline supervisors were coached on applying the protocols so production performance could be measured against plan, and KPIs covering inputs and outputs enabled action plans for deviations. On the sales side, a joint team designed a revised sales system and workflow, with representative targets per phase and an improved ordering system linking warehouse and finance. A large part of the engagement was coaching in Active Management Behaviours, the perfect-day-every-day approach, through seminars, role-plays and training.

The work delivered ZAR 7M in savings at a 4:1 return, cut emergency procurement spend 20% and reduced debtor days 15%, with a continuous improvement mindset embedded across both operations and sales.

A South American open-pit gold mine needed to reduce all-in sustaining costs and improve performance after ten consecutive years of sub-par results. Import restrictions and heavy bureaucracy hampered equipment availability. Management enlisted Proudfoot to increase productivity and reduce cost per ton.

Detailed studies spanned the entire value chain, supply chain, procurement, warehousing, mine operations, maintenance and technical services. The decade of underperformance traced to compounding systemic issues that reinforced one another: poor sourcing, ineffective maintenance with lost productivity from weak spares availability, inefficient supervision, a lack of scheduling, poor coordination between maintenance and procurement, weak adherence to drilling plans and no bottleneck management.

Proudfoot designed and implemented a comprehensive Management Operating System with KPIs, behaviors and open communication, built around bottleneck management. Drill and blast pattern compliance was standardized to reduce explosive waste, maintenance planning was improved through data analysis, and daily information was captured for weekly review with area chiefs. Visual tools, training and coaching drove buy-in, crews were trained on Active Management Behaviours, and follow-up visits after completion protected the gains. The work delivered $64M in annualised benefits, a 30% throughput improvement, a 15% productivity increase, a 13% improvement in tonnes per kilometre per operating hour and a 5% reduction in explosives consumption, breaking a ten-year pattern that internal efforts had not.

A specialist electronics manufacturer in northern Iceland, located there for cheap geothermal electricity, faced competitive pressure from newer factories in lower-cost locations. Already a modern, high-productivity business, it was under pressure to cut costs and plan for continuous cost reduction. With effectively zero local unemployment, retaining good people was critical. The chief executive’s brief had two dimensions: immediate productivity improvements enabling a headcount reduction, and a longer-term automation strategy.

The chairman of the parent group engaged Proudfoot after prior success at an acquired plant elsewhere. Because the operation was already lean, incremental improvement was not enough; the competitive threat called for a step change through automation, but only if people embraced it. Proudfoot conducted a rapid assessment of key processes, production lines and functions, keeping discrete automation and business-wide change closely linked.

After a six-week design phase, the team ran innovation and creativity workshops with frontline people, supervisors and managers, using virtual and augmented reality tools to bring ideas to life. The workforce shifted from suspicion of technology to enthusiasm for it, automated laboratory testing cut errors and improved quality, and machine and workflow data from 61 production lines was put to better use. The work achieved a 17% headcount reduction, identified 30% for the next two years, and made the site the group’s leading plant for automation.

The construction of non-infrastructure assets for a critical water pipeline, delivered by a partnership alliance for a UK water utility, had fallen behind schedule. The pipeline was central to water security for large parts of the country, carrying a high public profile with the risk of reputational damage and regulator fines. A newly formed construction team was building across seven priority sites over a wide area, supported by relatively immature engineering design, commercial and planning functions that created bottlenecks and stopped teams breaking ground.

Proudfoot facilitated a process to reprioritise program scope against resource limitations and re-baselined the schedule, rebalancing design and procurement resources to match priorities. A much-improved Management Operating System was installed: effective weekly program manager meetings to coordinate sites and functions and escalate risks; a weekly leadership report communicating progress and gap-closure actions; sharper procurement scheduling meetings and service-level agreements with the end client; and a focused emergency response process for rapid reaction to critical-path issues. Active management behaviour coaching helped multiple site project managers share knowledge.

The program recovered measurably: a 21% improvement in the forecast completion date against baseline, a 20-point improvement in design completion and a 25-point increase in purchase orders placed. The program director described the new reporting as the bible he used to hold his team to account for delivery against promise.

A US manufacturer of structural steel products for the transport-infrastructure market had been acquired from its founder-owner and, after several rounds of restructuring, had seen performance suffer for three consecutive years, culminating in an $8M budget miss that cost the executive team their bonuses. A new plant manager had improved safety and reduced non-conformances, but the plant lacked mature processes, systems and a capable team. It ran with no standardized estimating process, poor material flow, 24 overlapping and ineffective meetings, and communication silos. Its maturity assessment scored the lowest possible on planning, scheduling and communication.

Proudfoot ran a co-venture engagement that went straight into a 16-week implementation with a compressed three-week assessment. Critique sessions across more than 10 operational areas captured over 500 improvement opportunities from 80-plus employees, and maturity was scored element by element. The team designed and installed 17 improvement projects across three workstreams: production planning and scheduling, operational excellence, and a complete redesign of the management operating system covering all 10 elements of the framework. Estimating was rationalised, a 6S program installed, and the meeting cadence rebuilt with terms of reference for every meeting type.

An eight-module leadership program reached 12 managers, all scoring 4.5 to 5.0 out of 5, with side-by-side coaching, and adoption tracked from 58% to 75% maturity. The engagement delivered a 10% productivity increase, a 20% cycle-time reduction, a 15% quality improvement and a 44% overtime reduction in the final month, achieving a full 10-of-10 element deployment in 16 weeks at a single-plant operation.

The chief operating officer of a well-known international airline needed to integrate maintenance operations for two different aircraft types to support an aggressive growth plan. The heads of each maintenance organization were concerned about the imminent changes. The goal was to improve quality, lower costs and integrate the two operations, and Proudfoot was engaged to assess the challenges and implement solutions collaboratively with both organizations.

Proudfoot mapped and modified current processes to meet higher standards, and engaged the workforce to transform into a highly efficient, team-oriented environment. Redundant layers were eliminated and staff reallocated to areas of need, with clear communication maintained at every step to secure buy-in. Each position was analyzed, documented and realigned with the new processes. Consistent maintenance activities were orchestrated for each aircraft type using two mirror organizations supported by a dedicated planning and engineering area, on a new foundation built from airline industry best practices and key benchmarks. Short Interval Control was installed as an early-warning system for potential delays, and supply-chain management changes eliminated obsolete parts and improved fleet availability.

The integration cut hangar time by 30 minutes per aircraft, lifted productivity 15% and reduced maintenance costs 2.2%, while improving scheduling and fleet availability. As the chief executive noted, effective communication across multiple channels broke down the barriers to change and transformed the culture into a team-first working environment.

The chief executive of a West African gold mining company needed to free cash from working capital for critical activities. Assets were stretched across three countries, two of them land-locked, and government customs delays compounded the logistical challenge.

Working capital was tied up in inventory because of long, uncoordinated supply chains and customs delays at land-locked borders. Proudfoot installed a central plan and shared KPIs across the three mines, bringing a fragmented supply chain under one set of controls. The team improved procurement practices, applied analysis tools to balance volume discounts against carrying cost, and set up a program to transfer skills to supply chain, operations and engineering staff.

A strategy was developed to engage governments and reduce customs waiting times, including the use of bonded warehouses, and mining, engineering, supply chain and finance were coordinated around a single plan. Strategic partnerships were formed with key suppliers while contracts were renegotiated and the RFI and RFP processes improved. The work released $9.3M of working capital, 7% above the annual target, cut supply chain lead times by 21%, saved 16% on renegotiated contracts and reduced transactional purchasing by 12%, freeing management to focus on strategic activity.

A world-class team at a new four-billion-dollar gold mine in the Americas had made progress toward ramp-up targets but output stayed inconsistent. The plant’s autoclave circuit was the bottleneck, driven by high sulphur variability in the feed, compounded by the need to develop operator, supervisor and planner skills and to coordinate detailed planning across the mine-to-mill process. Accelerating the ramp-up would significantly cut borrowing costs, and both the group and site leaders had worked with Proudfoot before.

The team gained alignment on objectives across the whole chain including maintenance, then defined a future-state ore-feed model to support higher autoclave throughput. Mine-to-mill planning was revised to reduce input variability, and shift-level and daily detailed planning was introduced. The defining move was shifting complexity out of operations and into planning, letting supervisors execute a safe, detailed plan rather than react to variability.

Three jointly resourced teams worked on ore-feed stability, maintenance planning and equipment reliability, with a fourth providing supervisor coaching and site communications, all delivered bilingually for the diverse workforce. The mine gained $187M over 18 months, a 38% rise in autoclave throughput and a 17% output increase, and met the lender’s test six months early, raising project value while building the capability to sustain the gains independently.

A world-leading aircraft-components manufacturer had fallen significantly behind on a strategically important military contract worth more than 150 million dollars. The critical component, common to 13 variants, passed through 57 production steps and took 83 days to make against a 28-day target, with the company behind on 186 of 200 units and each day of delay costing around 34 thousand dollars. The firm was simultaneously bidding for a new contract with the same customer, and years of reorganisations and poor succession planning had drained accumulated knowledge.

Proudfoot deployed a small team with two priorities: accelerate the critical component through its 57 steps, and upskill more than 200 frontline workers and 14 managers in lean principles and active management. Aerial Mapping identified the root cause of delay as non-value-added queue time between steps rather than processing time. New work-in-progress software improved visibility of production, plant flow and final assembly, and management met three times a week to resolve issues.

Queue times were minimized through active management and short-interval control. Production time fell from 83 to 41 days in three weeks, a 51% reduction, with the 28-day target set within 12 weeks. The work delivered a 9:1 return, recovered the contract schedule and strengthened the new bid, while changing the culture so that people felt back in control.

An 80-year family-run seafood wholesaler had grown into a significant industry player but hit a wall. Systems, processes and management controls had not kept pace, and leadership was adding headcount to cope. Three pressures landed at once: integrating a recently acquired operation of four facilities, absorbing an expansion that doubled the main processing and distribution site, and onboarding a new senior leadership team. The chief executive, who had engaged Proudfoot at a previous company, re-engaged on that track record.

Over a 35-week engagement, a three-week Aerial Mapping phase examined the business end to end across production, logistics, sales and marketing, strategic procurement, inventory and storage. The problem was growth outpacing management capability: unstable processes, headcount added without improving systems, uncontrolled inventory and ERP data-quality issues, compounded by the acquisition integration.

Managers and supervisors were coached at the point of execution on KPIs and daily planning, procurement moved to a broader category approach, inventory accountability was established where there had been none, and an interim solution mapped raw-product flow ahead of the ERP upgrade. The result was record production in eight months, a 25% productivity improvement (twice the first forecast), a 48% inventory reduction, a 25% cut in packaging cost and a marked drop in water consumption, with a significant EBITDA improvement and the capability to take on further M&A.

A diamond mining company with four mine sites and three management centers needed to improve operational efficiency after diamond prices softened. Business processes were overly complex and workforce engagement lagged. The managing director wanted to build a High Performance Organization by simplifying processes, improving efficiency, upskilling leaders and engaging the workforce.

Proudfoot designed a multi-stream implementation plan and ran a rapid, comprehensive analysis to find opportunities in structure and process. The core finding was that overly complex processes and too many organisational layers were consuming cost without adding value, while the price softening demanded rapid cost reduction without compromising production. The team de-layered the organization through a bottom-up redesign, simplified processes, and improved contractor management and capital project delivery.

Because the government was a shareholder, change could not be imposed from the top down. Proudfoot ran an inclusive engagement process, consulting before significant changes so the transformation advanced with government support. The work delivered a $96m reduction in labor and capital expenditure and a further $35m in procurement and contractor savings, a $131m total, alongside a 30% reduction in organisational levels and a 35% cut in non-core costs.

An agro-industrial sugarcane company in Brazil needed sustainable cost reduction to protect margins and build a foundation for the future. Having worked with the company’s mining operations before, the client engaged Proudfoot knowing its boots-on-the-ground philosophy suited an aggressive target timeline.

The team ran more than 50 full shift studies and 400 hours of field observation, linking operational opportunities to the P&L and identifying tens of millions in savings across four targets. A predictive production tool was built using Data Envelopment Analysis to find the optimal efficiency frontier, enabling decisions on operational volume and on the mix of own versus third-party cane. The mills, fleet and behaviors were running below optimum, but the root causes had been invisible because improvements were never correlated to P&L impact.

Procurement was transformed across more than 74 million dollars of spend, with automatic replenishment, obsolete-item elimination, category teams and an AI-powered supplier discovery run through a long-list, RFI, short-list and RFP pilot. A 140-plus person leadership structure across two plants was redesigned, and a four-pillar certification program trained internal change agents for sustainability. The work delivered $30M in overall savings, including $8.7M from strategic sourcing, $5.1M from a standardized operating system and $4.7M from equipment-effectiveness gains, a 38% productivity improvement through demand planning and a 28% reduction in the supplier base.

The senior vice president of supply at an independent North American refiner saw an opportunity to improve downstream profitability outside the fence, specifically in the Product Supply, Trading and Wholesaling teams. The business needed sharper decision making: better information, clearer decision rules and a more profit-focused culture across these commercial functions, which were operating in silos and missing optimization opportunities along the value chain.

Proudfoot worked side by side with the client team to develop and implement an Integrated Decision Framework for operational decisions. The framework detailed the linkages and interdependencies across the three teams and highlighted the key profit drivers, while an integrated road map organized information and people around commercial decision making. The implementation centred on people, committing Supply, Trading, Wholesaling and leadership to a shared decision model that drew on the best skills of each group. The model was then translated into specific critical behaviors, on which individuals were coached and trained.

By positioning the teams to maximize product value across market conditions, logistics constraints and inventories, and by removing silos through active management behaviour coaching, the work delivered $23M in annualised benefits on a $3M investment, a return above 7:1. Transportation rebills fell 5 to 10% and secondary costs dropped 19%, with a proactive, profit-focused culture replacing the old reactive approach.

A large integrated iron-ore complex, spanning open-pit mining, ore dressing, a concentrator, a pellet plant, loadout and an associated rail shop, needed to lift maintenance and asset-management performance across five operational areas at once to support its production plan and prepare for a step-up in output. Maintenance maturity on the client’s own 37-criteria framework sat at a 1.26 site-wide baseline, work-management discipline varied by area, defect elimination was unstructured, and backlog had built to roughly 22,000 hours in mine maintenance alone.

Proudfoot delivered a multi-area implementation organized into four workstreams: governance, work management, defect elimination and targeted role-execution initiatives. The operating system was designed through two structured commitment sessions that simultaneously specified the meeting architecture, defined role-level individual coaching checklists with weekly compliance scoring, secured formal stakeholder buy-in and set the KPIs. Work management gained a four-meeting framework from daily coordination to weekly schedule lock-in across roughly 12,800 maintenance plans; defect elimination became a complete standalone workstream with its own cadences, nine role profiles, problem-solving triggers and investigation templates, anchored by a correlation analysis proving the causal chain from work-management discipline to equipment reliability. A four-tier governance model and weekly core-team alignment sessions coordinated delivery, and the team deliberately coached effective use of the client’s existing enterprise systems rather than introducing new platforms, translating the methodology into the client’s own language through a 54-slide playbook.

Site-wide maintenance maturity rose from 1.26 to 2.8 across the layered relationship, with planner-level maturity tracked individually in every area. Heavy-truck availability climbed from an 80% baseline to around 84%, unscheduled pellet-plant losses fell from 7.5% to 5.9% within six weeks, a savings run-rate of roughly CA$600,000 a week or CA$30.8M annualised, and backlog dropped from about 22,000 to 5,000 hours in the mine and from 3,500 to 1,500 in ore dressing. Capability transfer ran through a three-party co-coaching model pairing a client master-data specialist, the area superintendent and the Proudfoot coach, and follow-on work was subsequently sold at the same account.

Deteriorating market conditions and intensified competition from low-cost producers put an Iraqi cement operation under pressure. The company, running an aggregates quarry, ready-mix and cement plants and a head office, employed around 1,000 staff and a similar number of contractors. Despite an internal cost-reduction program, the chief executive acknowledged it lacked the breadth and depth needed, with business results in jeopardy.

A detailed operational review found high staffing and below-benchmark labor productivity, unmanaged subcontractor cost, poor spare-parts management, limited working practices, a lack of management tools and critical skills gaps in local management, all pointing to a systemic shortage of management capability. Proudfoot ran a 12-month phased program: organisational redesign aligned to a best-practice operating model, productivity improvement from assessment data and benchmarking, service-contract renegotiation, detailed job analysis and a skills matrix informing headcount.

Cost reduction came through spare-parts and subcontractor sourcing, with 64% of spend shifted to best-cost countries, alongside shared services for the head office. Standard operating procedures, job aids and Short Interval Control tools were installed, and a People Solutions program trained all 1,000 staff, with 280 supervisors receiving specialist active-management coaching and one-on-one sessions. The work delivered €6M in operational savings, a 26% spare-parts cost reduction, a 21% cut in subcontractor spend, a 20% productivity improvement and a 19% headcount reduction.

An open-pit gold mine in Peru faced declining metal prices and a rising cost per ton. The productive life of the mine was ending, which called for a structure aligned to that reality while keeping the operation cost-effective. Dispatch, loading and hauling practices needed improvement to eliminate waiting time, blasting pattern controls were missing, supervisors leaned on reactive responses rather than active management, and Short Interval Control was not being used to drive daily and weekly results.

A joint team assessed mine operations, maintenance, planning, dispatch, the leach pad and recovery processes, using Aerial Mapping and point-of-execution observation to pinpoint the issues. Proudfoot then designed and installed a sitewide Management Operating System covering best practice end to end. Dynamic dispatch reduced waiting and increased tonnes per kilometre per hour; hot shift changes and break coverage lifted productivity; and Short Interval Control across operations improved process control and recovery factors. In parallel, 160 managers and supervisors were trained and coached in Active Management Behaviours, and organisational layers were reduced to match the remaining mine life.

The combined effect was substantial: $15.4M in annualised benefits, a 20% tonnage increase, a 6% improvement in cost per kilometre per operating hour, an 8% rise in haul-truck productivity, a 2% gold recovery gain and a 12% cost reduction from the leaner structure, all delivered as the asset approached the end of its life.

One of Europe’s largest airport ground-handling operators was struggling to stabilize operating profit across a network serving five countries, 35 airports, 44 airlines and more than 50 million passengers. Operations badly lacked standardization, which cost revenue, caused wild profit swings and had pushed the business close to bankruptcy. The chief executive needed a partner to work with 6,000 employees on a rapid, scalable transformation.

A three-week review developed a pilot for three airports ahead of a company-wide rollout, targeting a consistent operating margin. The findings pointed to a lack of management tools and skills, a poorly deployed operating system, inconsistent planning tools generating rework, inaccurate operating standards and best practices that were never shared. The pilot updated operating standards across ramp, passenger and traffic operations with robust benchmarks by aircraft type, built a common planning solution with clear roles, and designed a bespoke Management Operating System.

Non-core revenue was enhanced through daily checklists and management follow-up, and training focused on the 8 Active Management Behaviours and a culture of coordination in a heavily unionised setting. The pilot delivered more than $6M in annual revenue uplift, improved operating standards reached 27 airports, and a rollout kit was prepared for 24 more, all achieved with the union workforce engaged rather than antagonised.

One of Latin America’s largest railway companies had reported two consecutive years of negative earnings after almost a decade of low capital investment that had weakened its rail infrastructure. The company sought an operations partner to restore profitability quickly through productivity, cost-saving and safety initiatives. The assessment found maintenance staff spending roughly a third of their time finalising the daily schedule rather than maintaining the railroad, spare parts not readily available and causing downtime, few work standards to benchmark efficiency, little reinforcement of safe practice with frequent accidents, and little interaction between the train control center and field workers.

Six concurrent workstreams were initiated: rapid profitability activities, rail and fleet maintenance, yard execution, organisational design, training and development, and sustainability. A Management Operating System connected all of them and was fundamental to better planning, scheduling and maintenance, with standards that enabled daily performance measurement and prevented lost time. Job descriptions were analyzed, roles consolidated, unnecessary layers eliminated and employees redistributed to meet projected demand with clear communication lines. Working side by side with three levels of the organization, the team embedded a culture committed to doing things right first time, made shift handovers seamless, and built safety consciousness through daily meetings.

The program delivered $29M in annualised benefits: $3M from maintenance productivity, $11M from accident reduction, $6.5M from lower third-party contractor costs and $3M from reduced diesel consumption, restoring profitability while transforming the safety culture.

One of North America’s leading jet-engine and aircraft-systems manufacturers had fallen significantly behind schedule on a strategically important military contract. Turnaround times for two key engine types were well beyond target, putting plans, profitability and customer satisfaction at risk while the whole aviation supply chain was under pressure. The client had recently completed a successful Proudfoot engagement at another site where production time was cut by 60%.

Three weeks of analytics and Aerial Mapping produced a broad gap analysis of processes and interfaces, with direct observation and data assessing planning, the shop floor and the operating system to find root causes. The delays came from bottlenecks in materials management, inconsistent gate processes, poor vendor management and a lack of work-in-progress visibility, not from any capacity constraint. Quick wins removed unnecessary steps in materials management and redeployed labor hours.

The team standardized processes across gates, redesigned vendor management and scrap replacement, implemented a custom turnaround tracker for real-time work-in-progress visibility, built an electronic bill of materials for the entire engine, and created a supplier portal embedded in the operating system. The nine-week implementation delivered a 21-day turnaround reduction, $27m in additional net profit at a 22:1 return, and more than 50 additional engines through the plant a year, with a further 17 days of reduction identified for the following quarter.

A large copper-gold mining complex, a joint venture between a major global diversified miner and a national government, carried a workforce of 13,137 people across six operational disciplines with no established labor-demand planning or benchmarking process. Three internal data sources returned three materially different totals for the same population, the line between employees and non-rostered labor was blurred, and more than 1,000 unique job designations had to be rationalised before any modeling could begin. The client needed a calibrated, driver-based model to project workforce requirements across future production scenarios, and an external benchmark to judge whether its labor was sized appropriately.

Proudfoot delivered a fully virtual, 13-week, fixed-fee build as lead integrator of a three-way partnership: a specialist workforce-planning modeling partner, a third-party benchmarking partner with a proprietary dataset of more than 300 global mining operations, and Proudfoot’s own project management and operational oversight, all under a single purchase order. The build ran from a strategic activity-level model to a tactical position-level version, processing 18,043 people through a documented extract-transform-load decision trail against 35 standardized drivers and a six-tier hierarchy from main area down to position. The base model was validated to a 99.8% match against actuals before any scenario work began, then equipped with sensitivity, attribution and simulation analysis, dashboard reporting, user training and acceptance testing.

The benchmark surfaced a structural finding: the current population sat far above the industry range for the operation it would become, an implied delta of 5,885 to 10,850 positions depending on the production scenario, with general and administrative roles at 53% of site population against a 17% study-group average. The multi-source data reconciliation itself became a deliverable, and the client’s technical-services team continued operating the model after handover, supported by a two-year platform license and a two-week support window.

One of the world’s largest aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul providers, operating a vast hangar complex handling many wide and narrow-body aircraft at once, was working with its airline partner to improve heavy-maintenance efficiency. The chief executive wanted more from existing resources to secure a year-on-year revenue increase, quickly and safely. The challenge was sharpened by a commercial tension: higher labor productivity for the MRO could cut into its revenue model. The key was hangar utilization, because an aircraft on the ground earns nothing.

Proudfoot used rapid analytics and observation to find the critical opportunities, then worked alongside employees from both the airline and the MRO across five integrated streams. Risk prediction forecast critical defects months before input. Advanced planning externalised non-critical activities to maximize hangar use. Supply chain synchronisation coordinated materials, tooling and trades to the critical path, dynamic scheduling drove planning precision, and real-time performance management made lead indicators transparent so variances were caught early.

Turnaround time fell 20%, productivity rose more than 10%, hangar time per aircraft dropped, and maintenance cost reduced. More than 200 hangar days were freed each year, and 250 employee days of released capacity let the client win a new airline customer, with the win-win commercial design satisfying both partners.

One of the world’s largest chemical corporations was suffering significant budget overruns during maintenance shutdowns at a major epoxy plant, where every day of lost production meant more than one million dollars in lost revenue. After a corporate merger and high staff turnover, the management team needed to identify big improvement opportunities before upcoming major maintenance events. The global manufacturing director, who knew Proudfoot from a prior successful assessment, re-engaged the firm.

Proudfoot tracked 37 KPIs across the turnaround to build a maturity assessment across five phases, working side by side with management, supervisors and frontline people at the point of execution. The overruns were being driven by permitting delays, poor contractor coordination, a lack of real-time milestone tracking and time lost on non-value-adding work. Post-merger turnover had also drained institutional knowledge, so teams were repeating mistakes from prior shutdowns.

The team simplified the work-permitting system to resolve delays, implemented real-time monitoring of milestones and work status, streamlined contractor procurement and communication, and increased paid time on value-adding activities. The assessment captured lessons learned in a prioritized improvement roadmap, identifying between $4M and $11M of annual revenue capture depending on the process, a 20 to 30% reduction in event duration and a 5 to 15% productivity improvement, all positioned to be realized at the next major maintenance event.

A critical ventilation shaft at one of the world’s largest underground mines had fallen three months behind schedule. It sat on the critical path for the expansion, which would double the underground fleet and development rate. The contractor had already improved cycle time to the industry benchmark, but the project now needed better-than-benchmark performance to safely claw back schedule, with each day of delay worth significant lost net present value.

Proudfoot rapidly assessed the operation and applied a lean methodology to improve the work process. A joint team found opportunities to align the workforce around a common plan, clarify communication and optimize the sinking cycle. Detailed studies of each component, drill, blast, muck, bolt, concrete, meetings and maintenance, surfaced specific lost time: vent damage, gas after re-entry, inconsistent drilling, late cement trucks, shift-start delays and unclear supervisor roles.

Daily Schedule Control was implemented to track variance to plan and set shift-to-shift expectations, the local workforce was trained and then coached one-on-one, and the crews participated in problem-solving so ideas were rapidly tested and adopted, with national team members designing innovations that became site standards. Cycle time fell well below the benchmark, sinking rates improved 43%, the schedule over-run shrank by 62 days, $62M of net present value was recovered, and 150 days of work were delivered free of lost-time injuries.

Across a range of Sales and Operations Planning engagements, Proudfoot encountered a common set of problems: on-time delivery and customer service below expectation, forecasting and production-planning flaws generating surplus inventory, key information not shared across teams, production schedules changing constantly and driving excessive overtime, procurement frequently late, and high freight costs from poor container utilization and last-minute shipment rescue.

The pattern underneath was consistent. Sales and operations planning dysfunction is typically a coordination and behavior problem, with sales, procurement, warehouse, manufacturing and finance operating in silos rather than to a shared plan.

Proudfoot designs, implements and accelerates these transformations through people, following a humanise, optimize and digitise approach at the point of execution. The work establishes an end-to-end operating model with cross-functional visibility and coordinated planning, then embeds an integrated demand-supply rhythm in which information is shared and incentives are aligned. Across these engagements the aggregate results include a 31% inventory reduction, a 19% reduction in overtime, 19% freight cost savings, a 20% increase in manufacturing and distribution productivity, and an 11% improvement in working capital. These figures are directional, drawn from multiple engagements rather than a single client, and are best used to size the prize early in a conversation.

Severn Trent Water faced a regulator-set turn-of-flow milestone on a lead wastewater pumping station and rising main being delivered by a Tier 1 civils contractor under an NEC Option E target-cost contract. The project was running materially over baseline, from an original $43.1M contract value to a $77.9M forecast, with significant commercial exposure on disputed cost events, a fragmented multi-tier supply chain and a sustained productivity gap against Tier 1 contractor benchmarks. The workforce was contractor-employed, constraining direct training mandates, and governance had to span client, main contractor and subcontractor tiers simultaneously.

Proudfoot deployed a focused 15-week implementation across five workstreams, quick wins, in-field operational excellence, program management, subcontractor management, and a maturity overlay on the client’s own integrated project team principles. A nine-meeting management operating system was installed across the three organisational tiers, each meeting with bespoke terms of reference, and engineered around the NEC Option E framework: compensation-event flows with full accountability mapping, early warning notices, the monthly application-for-payment cycle, and forecast-to-completion as the core commercial output. The whole cadence was anchored on a single milestone, with a daily 15-minute critical-path standup and a weekly stretch-target planning session. When direct supervisor training met contractor resistance, the team pivoted to coaching client-side assurance engineers to coach contractor supervisors in the field. A two-stage commercial forensic, benchmark analysis first and contractual analysis second, matured the largest finding, vehicle cost double-charging, from $515k indicative to $2.54M confirmed, alongside further disallowance forensics on subcontractor costs.

The regulator-set turn-of-flow milestone was delivered on time, ahead of the regulator’s January deadline. At close-out the engagement had $5.70M identified and $2.88M agreed, with the largest single item substantially banked in-engagement, and a structured benefits ladder separating identified, agreed and actual value through the contract’s change machinery. A six-factor capital delivery excellence framework was scored at close, and the field-observation discipline installed during the engagement continued under the client’s own team beyond exit.

Severn Trent Water’s clean-water repair and maintenance operation was under pressure on three reinforcing fronts: street-works penalty exposure of roughly $1.794M a year, rebuild waste running at 53% of work in progress, and growing reliance on costly contractor capacity. The in-scope operation deployed 287 gang FTEs across four regions and eight counties through a hybrid model of direct labor and three contractor partners with materially different shift rates and productivity profiles. Measured productivity sat well below industry best practice, leakage demand was assumed flat at 30% when actuals showed 45%, and scheduling ran without a plan freeze, with same-day dispatch the norm.

Proudfoot delivered a sequential analysis and implementation compressed into an 11-week core. Three workstreams ran in parallel, forecasting and planning, scheduling optimization, and right first time, alongside eleven quick wins. The team installed an eight-meeting forecasting and planning architecture with regional adoption scoring, a redesigned scheduling process with a four-day plan model, a 24-hour plan freeze and day-before dispatch, more than 60 KPIs across the workstreams, and refreshed operational standard times for common job types. Process mapping at production fidelity was validated by the team leaders and supervisors who run the work, and a structured midpoint review formally agreed which deliverables would carry into a second phase rather than letting scope drift.

By the eleventh week all eleven quick wins had reached installation, day-before dispatch had moved from 19% to 36%, and 8 of 17 agreed contractor gang reductions were in effect. Within two weeks of exit, as the remaining commissioned gang changes took effect, annualised benefits reached $3.060M, 136% of the target. The program was handed to a client-appointed project manager with a 200-plus-item sustainability action log, a meeting-effectiveness scoring instrument trended weekly through the engagement, and an operating-system tracker. The relationship continued into a follow-on engagement in the client’s capital delivery program.

A major global building-materials company was expanding its autonomous haul-truck program across its North American aggregates division of around 175 quarry facilities. A single quarry was operating a mixed fleet, seven autonomous haul trucks alongside manual loader and support equipment, with pit supervisors managing both modes at once. No standardized operating procedures existed for this dual-mode environment: supervisory practices were undocumented, knowledge resided with individuals, and there was no framework for training new supervisors or ensuring consistency across shifts. The division’s leadership had seen the company’s cement-division playbook work and sought an equivalent for the autonomous quarry context.

Proudfoot delivered a template-development engagement: a short-form specialist playbook focused on producing a reusable deliverable. A senior consultant interviewed subject-matter experts, observed current-state operations, documented best practices and structured everything into a searchable format. The playbook was organized around a jobs-to-be-done framework, with each operational domain broken into jobs, activities, tasks and step-by-step procedures written so that an uninformed reader could follow them. The 25-tab, macro-enabled playbook covered all 13 operational domains, from pre-shift inspections and autonomous start-up through to drill-and-blast coordination, quality control and shift handover.

By standardizing the supervisory approach for autonomous operations, the playbook documented the procedures that let the client run the autonomous fleet without the seven previously required manual backup drivers, delivering $1.05M of indirect cost avoidance against a fee of around $72,000, a 14.6:1 return. Though scoped as documentation rather than performance improvement, it addressed all 10 management-operating-system elements in a single document. The client signed it off satisfied and shared it across other divisions, validating its quality for replication across the 175-facility portfolio.

ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe runs a five-mill flat steel program inside one of Europe’s largest integrated steel works, with two hot strip mills, a third hot rolling unit and two cold rolling mills feeding common downstream finishing. The pilot hot strip mill faced a 10-day major annual shutdown carrying 1,149 work orders, more than 50 scaffolds across five scaffolding firms, parallel crane windows and a four-line concurrent maintenance front. Recurring organization gaps from a shutdown five years earlier remained open, the five mills ran structurally different weekly maintenance cadences, and modules touching frontline work organization had to respect the German co-determination regime.

Proudfoot embedded a three-module program inside the client’s own maintenance transformation governance. Cross-plant workshops harmonised best practices across all five mills against a five-level maturity scan, and each mill received an implementation plan with named priorities and a six-to-twelve-month horizon. For the September shutdown the team designed and deployed a 13-element shutdown operating system: a 73-point readiness checklist, six-section area boards with explicit meeting rules, a five-plus-one board structure with named production and maintenance leads, a twice-daily meeting cadence with a one-page daily executive report, a 24-hour three-shift coordination rota, multi-vendor scaffolding alignment with a safety induction protocol, and crane availability tracking. Twice-daily productivity sampling across 17 areas quantified craft productivity against the industry standard, and integration with the client’s condition-monitoring platform converted an emerging gearbox bearing wear pattern into a planned in-window replacement.

The bearing detection alone avoided around €3M in unplanned failure cost. The shutdown completed with rolling restarted 32 minutes ahead of plan, and just 4 minor incidents across the full multi-vendor program. The engagement closed with a two-day, 12-module shutdown project-management training curriculum for maintenance heads and production leadership, a 42-page structured retrospective comparing the 2023 shutdown against its 2018 predecessor, and per-plant implementation plans handed over to all five mills.

The management team of a South American open-pit copper operation faced falling metal prices and a sharply rising cost per ton, jeopardising annual results and projected growth. Improving productivity across every process and reducing operating costs became the priority. The client had worked with Proudfoot at other sites.

An end-to-end assessment through Aerial Mapping covered mine operations and maintenance, the reduction circuit, lixiviation, reclaiming, contractors, labor and material across the site and the offices. The joint team analyzed processes, management tools and supervisory behavior across the whole chain with root-cause analysis. The defining finding was that supervisors were passive rather than proactive, plans and short-interval controls were absent, and dispatching and loading parameters were generating waste.

Proudfoot designed and implemented a Management Operating System for reclaiming, the dry and wet areas, mine operations and maintenance, with Short Interval Control installed everywhere, structured shift transitions, daily root-cause meetings, and a Supervisor Perfect Day model. On-the-floor coaching followed an individual plan for each manager and supervisor. Supervisors shifted to proactive management, variances were caught and acted on quickly, and within three months the mine recorded its best production numbers with no machine stoppages and zero incidents. The work delivered $250M in overall annualised benefits, an 18.5% unit-cost reduction, a 27% recovery improvement and an 18% reclaiming cost reduction.