Operations & Cost Structure · Mid-Market Manufacturing
We find the $4M hiding in your plant network.
Kestrel spends six weeks inside your P&L and your plant floor before we recommend anything. Most engagements pay for themselves within the first freed working-capital cycle.
Approach
Three phases. No slideware in between.
Every engagement runs the same three phases, in order, with a client sign-off gate between each: Diagnose (four to six weeks on-site across your plants, reviewing routing data, cost-to-serve, and inventory turns line by line), Design (a specific, costed set of changes — which lines move, which SKUs get repriced, which suppliers get renegotiated — never a generic operating-model slide), and Install (Kestrel stays on-site through the first two full cycles of the change, not just the recommendation memo). We bill fixed fee per phase, not time and materials, and we publish our fee against the savings we find in the closing memo.
“We don’t hand you a strategy deck and leave. We’re still on the floor when the new routing goes live.”
Practice Areas
Three problems. We only take these three.
Plant-Network Rationalization
Deciding which of your plants make which SKUs, and which plant should close. Typical engagement: a 4-plant network down to 3, freight and changeover cost modeled SKU-by-SKU before a single line moves.
Working-Capital Reduction
Inventory sitting on the floor because forecasting and purchasing don't talk to each other. Typical result: 15-25 days of inventory freed without a service-level hit, verified against 90 days of actual fill-rate data post-change.
Price-to-Cost Realignment
Finding the SKUs quietly priced below fully-loaded cost after three years of input-cost inflation nobody re-priced for. Typical result: 2-4 points of gross margin recovered on the affected SKU set within one pricing cycle.
Engagements
A sample of recent results.
Automotive stamping
4-plant network (Ohio/Indiana/Kentucky/Michigan) — consolidated to 3 plants, freight and changeover remodeled
$11.2M annualized
Industrial fastener manufacturer
60 SKUs re-priced against updated steel cost — margin recovered on affected SKUs
+3.4 pts gross margin
Packaging converter
Forecasting/purchasing decoupled from three disconnected spreadsheets — inventory days freed
19 days of inventory
HVAC component maker
Two plants running duplicate tooling for the same part family — tooling consolidated, one plant re-scoped
$2.6M capex avoided
Client names withheld per engagement letter; industry, scope, and result figures are as reported in each engagement's closing memo.
Insights
What we’ve learned that’s actually worth reading.
The working-capital problem is never the warehouse. It's the forecast meeting that hasn't changed its format since 2011.
400 words
Why we walk away from culture and branding engagements
350 words
The three questions we ask before we agree to close a plant
500 words
“Kestrel told us our fourth plant should close in the first diagnostic readout. We spent eight months arguing with them about it. They were right, and the freight model they built is still how we route today.”
“Every other firm we brought in wanted eighteen months and a steering committee. Kestrel wanted our SAP export and six weeks. That was the pitch that actually worked.”
Contact
Tell us what’s actually wrong first.
A scoping call is 45 minutes, no slides. Bring your last two years of plant-level P&L if you can — we’ll tell you on the call whether this is a fit, and if it isn’t, we’ll say so.
Start a Scoping Callpartners@kestrelstrategy.example · (412) 555-0119 · Pittsburgh, PA