Despite strong growth, two companies within a building exterior access group were facing challenges managing production efficiency and inventory costs. An initial assessment identified several operational gaps impacting visibility, communication, and performance across the organization.
Key areas of opportunity included:
- Limited visibility into production performance, with project managers spending significant time on administrative tasks
- Ineffective meetings that lacked alignment to key performance indicators
- Inconsistent estimating tools for specialized projects
- Unstructured site visits with limited expectation setting for field teams
- Poor inventory management and limited visibility into rental usage by item
- Undefined roles and responsibilities leading to duplicated efforts and rework
- Inconsistent communication across departments
Carpedia partnered with the client to:
- Install a defined meeting structure with relevant reporting to improve visibility and control at a company and project level
- Incorporate parameters and margin tracking to utilize the estimation tool for specialized jobs
- Create a Daily Production Report to improve visibility into performance relative to estimates
- Shift administrative tasks from managers to the Operations team increasing field presence
- Establish hand-off criteria between Project Managers and Estimators
- Implement inventory management tool to improve visibility and control of monthly adjustments
- Streamline key processes and redefined departmental responsibilities to increase efficiency
The Results
Specific results include:
- Improved Net Income % from 13.4% to 20.4%
- Improved underestimation from 15.7% to 8.9%
- Reduced inventory $ as a % of revenue by 17%
- Reduced admin labor as a % of revenue by 30%
- Improved productivity within Billing / Collections from 66% to 79%
- Reduced return process cycle time by 28%
- Increased manager field time by 15% with active management coaching and task delegation
