Global Food Processing Organization

Overcoming process constraints in 6 months drives a $2.7 million increase in monthly run rate

How fast can you turn around performance to meet revenue and volume targets?

Process issues constrained a recently acquired business from delivering on revenue and profitability goals. West Monroe worked with our client to act in just weeks, increasing peak monthly revenue run rate by $2.7 million within six months.

$2.7 million

increase in peak monthly revenue run rate by improving make-to-order processes

$3.8 million

annual cost reduction through variable labor savings, directly boosting EBITDA

55 percentage points

increase in inventory accuracy, reducing the risk of order fulfillment errors and customer dissatisfaction

The Challenge

Our client, a global food processing organization, found significant operating challenges in a recently acquired business unit. Critical gaps in supply chain, manufacturing, and business processes—and insufficient coordination among teams and departments—constrained the potential for service level, revenue, market share, and profitability. Leadership needed a plan to deliver rapid service level recovery and manufacturing cost reduction.

Project Timeline

Weeks

Assessed operations and supply chain and delivered recommendations

months

Implemented PMO, inventory management, and operations productivity initiatives

Months

Implemented supply chain S&OE and new product development process improvements

Months

Built roadmap for automated order management process improvements for a Make-to-Order at scale business strategy

An Undeniably Different Approach

Our multidisciplinary team quickly assessed operations—including supply chain capabilities, operating model maturity, process effectiveness, and master data management—from multiple perspectives. Using an operations and supply chain diligence approach focused on creating financial value, we defined baseline process performance to guide deeper analysis.

We were ready for action within two weeks. We established a project management office (PMO) alongside our client’s leaders and executed multiple back-office, front-office, manufacturing, supply chain, and analytics initiatives over 13 weeks. Our team introduced new KPIs and coached the client’s manufacturing, supply chain, customer service, and leadership to lead and sustain changes in:

Manufacturing productivity: Launched overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) projects to increase efficiency and throughput, reduce variable labor costs, and improve production schedule adherence.
Supply chain improvements: Developed a plant-level inventory accuracy control plan and provided coaching to first-line leaders to drive performance improvement. Introduced a sales and operations execution process to improve visibility and collaboration end-to-end, including sales, procurement, R&D, manufacturing, and customer service.
Business process effectiveness: Introduced an order fulfillment control plan and cadence to stabilize and speed up the high-transactional volume make-to-order fulfillment model.
Maximizing digital assets: Provided team training on real-time intelligence systems for optimized order flow and guided them on the effective use of warehouse management systems.

Real results

The new business unit saw rapid, quantifiable results. Within six months, the average monthly revenue run rate increased $2.7 million through make-to-order process improvements—hitting both revenue and volume targets. The unit realized $3.8 million in annual EBITDA benefit through variable labor cost savings and reduced customer risks by increasing inventory accuracy to over 90%—a 55 percentage-point improvement—and manufacturing OEE by 25 percentage points for the highest-margin assets.

Our work was not just about boosting short-term financial performance; it equipped the organization to sustain and build upon it. The unit has stable and more predictable end-to-end supply chain performance and is now transitioning into a continuous improvement phase that positions it to realize a digital maturity path while growing profitably in 2024 and beyond.