Lean System Design – Hardin

Results Case Studies

Case Study Snapshot

Results At A Glance

Production Efficiency

+21%

Release-to-Delivery Time

Cut in Half (~9 Months)

Customer Trust

Resilient Lean System

Key Takeaways

  • Capacity tool using pricing data and labor hours enabled sales-to-capacity balancing.
  • S&OP Lite monthly process aligned sales, engineering, procurement, and production.
  • Disruption identification and contingency strategies built supply chain resilience.
  • Re-sequencing and strategic outsourcing expanded bottleneck capacity without sacrificing margin.

Where This Approach Fits

Best for custom or engineer-to-order manufacturers with long backlogs and complex, multi-department production cycles.

Lean Process Improvement Sales & Operations Planning

Download Case Study

Problem / Challenge:

A growing generator packaging company had an 18-month backlog and struggled to consistently and accurately meet customer demand due to increasing project complexity, supply chain disruptions, customer delays, and operational challenges.

Lean Approach

We followed the Lean System Design framework to support greater operational efficiency:

  • Plan – To balance sales and capacity
  • Source – In time for production needs
  • Make – Eliminate non-value-added work
  • Store – Design working-ahead strategically
  • Deliver – Clear customer communication
  • Return – Successful recovery from disruptions

Implementation Details:

  • Developed a capacity tool using pricing output data and available labor hours by department
  • Improved the accuracy and flexibility of the pricing tool to match sales needs
  • Facilitated a monthly S&OP Lite process to facilitate matching the sales strategy to the available production capacity
  • Identified common project disruptions and worked with the team to develop identification and contingency strategies especially related to procurement, engineering design, customer supplied parts, and customer driven changes
  • Used the capacity tool to identify opportunities for increased throughput and create more stable production needs through re-sequencing and outsourcing
  • Supported the development of SOPs for project kickoff, release, and production

Improved Scheduling and Plans

  • Scheduling process includes weekly input from Engineering, Production, Procurement, and Project Managers to ensure plan reflects full complexity and timeline needs of each job
  • Monthly adjustments as customer needs change and sales team closes additional business to ensure predictable and controlled revenue growth including sales identifying opportunities to fill in demand in non-bottleneck departments

Operational Improvements

  • Create consistent flow by balancing complexity and variety of in-progress jobs
  • Expanded capacity of bottleneck departments in strategic ways, enabling strong growth, but without sacrificing margin
  • Weekly triage of operational issues for process improvement opportunities

Difficulties Encountered

  • Custom manufacturing industry means each job is unique and often brings significant complexity
  • Lead times both for customer supplied components and job-specific parts may be long and may experience delays
  • End customers are multiple levels removed, often leading to late-arriving requirements and changes
  • Each project is both physically large and takes weeks of production time, leading to high inventory and labor costs with limited visibility to efficiency issues

Results

  • Release-to-delivery time cut in half (~9 months from release to shipment instead of 18+ months)
  • Production efficiency increased 21%
  • Resilient Lean System leading to greater trust from customers

Learn more about Lean Process Improvement and Sales & Operations Planning

Need Similar Results?

Request A Consultation

We can review your current operation, pinpoint constraint areas, and outline practical next steps.

Related Case Studies

MANUFACTURING

Driving Profitability and Performance at Chemline

67% to 97% 9.7 to 13.5 (+39%)

Read Case Study

RETAIL

Optimizing Omnichannel Fulfillment for Total Hockey

$300K+ 50%+ within 1-Day Delivery

Read Case Study

MANUFACTURING

Accelerating the RFP Process for Leonardo DRS

+40% Consolidated into One

Read Case Study

Client Voice

What Clients Say

View All Testimonials

"If you are looking for someone to help drive improvements, create repeatable processes and mentor younger staff in your facility then reach out to Supply Velocity. Your expertise and dedication have driven significant im..."

Tim Donohoe

COO, Chemline

"I am thrilled to provide this testimonial for Supply Velocity and their outstanding work in implementing Lean Warehouses and processes at Crescent Parts & Equipment through the COVID pandemic. With their data-first focus..."

Josh Cole

Director of Supply Chain, Crescent Parts & Equipment

"For several years we have worked with Supply Velocity to support us with their expertise on Lean Operations and Supply Chain Management. Supply Velocity has helped us implement Lean, improve our inventory systems, and ed..."

Lorenza Pasetti

CEO, Volpi Foods

"Supply Velocity is driving instrumental change in our inventory management processes. This is critical for us to be competitive in a supply chain environment with numerous disruptions. They are making change happen, whic..."

Jim Carroll

Executive Vice President Operations, Schaeffer Manufacturing

"In a time of volatile supply chain disruption, Supply Velocity is helping us develop Demand and Supply Planning processes to proactively tackle these new challenges. They are genuine partners, working with our team, faci..."

Jane Thrasher

Vice President of Supply Chain, Horizon Hobby

"Mitch Millstein and his team helped guide our shop fabrication division in the re-layout of our custom pipe and steel fabrication facility when we moved into a new building. It is not only the results but how he helped...."

Geoff Gross

President, Gross Mechanical

"In 2015 we began working with Dr. Mitch Millstein to optimize our inventory locations supporting e-commerce and in-store inventory needs. From this work we developed a new omni-channel warehousing and inventory plan that..."

Rob Bowers

Vice President of Strategy, Total Hockey

"Myerson engaged Supply Velocity, specifically Ray Davis to visit our plant in Trinidad to conduct a two day assessment of our production procedures and provide us feedback on areas for improvement and where applicable, a..."

Lee Hartwell CPA

Plant Manager, Myerson Tooth

"Supply Velocity has provided the technical expertise and political capital to move our project forward. They have just the right amount of push and the right amount of support. Supply Velocity has helped us make real cha..."

David Walters

President, Hy-C

"Our experience with Supply Velocity was one of the best values we have ever had from a consulting project. Cyril Narishkin brought a structured lean methodology, invaluable experience and engaging facilitation skills to..."

Mike Howard

CEO, Aspeq

"Supply Velocity has helped Clean succeed in a number of ways. First, they provided the education that kicked off our Lean Process Improvement journey. They also facilitated a number of large supply chain and process impr..."

Jeff Lazaroff

Senior Vice President, Clean Uniform

"We engaged with Supply Velocity to help us embed process improvement at all levels of the business. Our team learned from Mitch to let the data drive decisions, to use Lean tools to help us see our processes critically a..."

Dionne Dumitru

COO, Weekends Only

"Supply Velocity gave us the tools to analyze our business and processes based on the facts and numbers versus our perceptions. Our common quote was "Let the numbers lead us". The key for our organization was how quickly..."

Ned Lane

President, CeeKay Supply

"We used Supply Velocity to rethink our sales process. By analyzing the entire process we found wasted time in our Sales, Admin and Operations departments. Streamlining this process created extra time for each Sales Rep,..."

Jeff Reitz

Vice President, Central States Bus

"Supply Velocity created visibility within our Assurance Services Group... visibility of performance, Client-service, employee satisfaction and processing time. Using the Supply Velocity System, Audit Report Cycle time is..."

Fred Kostecki

Partner-In-Charge, Assurance Services, Rubin Brown

"Supply Velocity's Lean Six Sigma System has given us new tools to help improve our sales performance. We have learned new ways to analyze our business which makes problem solving more accurate and has made us better lead..."

Rachel Andreasson

Executive Vice President - Marketing, Wallis Companies

"The role of the Erie Insurance Marketing Department has been evolving over the past several years - from a support role to a more critical role of driving growth in our organization. Because of our increased workload and..."

Karen Rugare

Director of Marketing, Erie Insurance

"Isolating a problem, finding short, and long term solutions with measurable results is what was promised and results is what was delivered by Supply Velocity. Upon launch of the Lean Six Sigma Selling System, we knew mor..."

Mark A. Presker

General Manager, Architectural Millwork of St. Louis

"In the spring of 2003, the St. Louis Area Chapter of the American Red Cross engaged Supply Velocity, Inc. to perform a study and make recommendations to streamline office processes, maximize cash flow in purchasing and w..."

Joe White

CEO, American Red Cross - Saint Louis Chapter

"We are using Supply Velocity's Lean Six Sigma methods to analyze a variety of processes including rationalizing SKUs (stock-keeping-units). By using math to evaluate SKUs we took some of the emotion out of our decisions...."

Mark Kelso

Director of Process Improvement, Save-A-Lot

"Anheuser-Busch Precision Printing had been implementing Lean Operations on our own for the past two years. We needed to move faster and partnered with Supply Velocity, Inc. Through Supply Velocity, Inc.'s mathematical wo..."

Rich Lavosky

General Manager, Anheuser-Busch Precision Printing

"C&R was struggling with labor productivity. The construction crews were often missing materials that they needed to do their work. This caused significant idle time. Supply Velocity, Inc. and C&R used value stream mappin..."

Tom Kuthe

V.P. Construction Operations, C&R Mechanical

"Your process encourages this group to work together, better communicate and have fun doing it."

George Edinger

President, C&R Mechanical

"Closure Medical recently completed a major reorganization in order to enhance our ability to rapidly create innovative medical devices. We hired Supply Velocity to help us map out the process and service flows of the new..."

Gabe Szabo

Vice President, Product Development, Closure Medical - A Division of Johnson & Johnson

"We are pleased that Essex selected Supply Velocity, Inc. as our Lean Implementation Partner. At one facility, we have saved over $350,000 in work-in-process inventory, reduced throughput time from 2 weeks to minutes and..."

Terry Etter

Vice President of Operations, Essex Medical Systems

"In thirty years of hiring consultants, Supply Velocity, Inc. was the first to tell me what they were going to do, set a price they stuck to and substantially exceed my expectations. I have recommended them to friends and..."

Bill Gilbert

President, Fusion Coatings

"Many thanks to all three Supply Velocity presenters. I think you guys took a very difficult time for learning and capitalized on everyone's time and training needs. I truly hope this helps your business as this was a con..."

Mark Holdinghausen

VP of Operations, DEMA Engineering

"We used Supply Velocity on our Warehouse optimization project. One of the key characteristics of Supply Velocity is that they listened to our requirements and provided a clear path for our Warehouse processes using lean..."

Haris Tokalic

President, Grand Rock, Inc.

"I’d recommend Supply Velocity to organizations looking for a hands‑on, data‑driven warehouse assessment with actionable outputs - particularly those dealing with operational change, new systems, or scaling challenges."

Jayson Wickenkamp

Senior Vice President, Image Solutions