FORGE"Your factory runs. The question is whether it runs toward margin or away from it."
David Reinholt
Founder, Forge · Former Toyota Production System Engineer
Tolerance: ±0.002 in
Karen Ostrowski
Senior Operations Consultant · 22 yrs · Tier 1 Automotive
Most plants think they have a capacity problem. What they actually have is a visibility problem.
Q. Where do you start when a VP calls saying throughput is down 18%?
We don't open the ERP first. We walk the floor for two hours with a stopwatch. In 80% of cases, the constraint isn't what the data says it is — it's one or two micro-stoppages that last 40 seconds each, repeating 60 times a shift. Nobody's counting them because they don't trip an alarm.
Q. What's the single metric most plants are measuring wrong?
OEE. They're calculating it on planned production time, which excludes scheduled downtime. The real number — total effective equipment performance — is almost always 12 to 20 points lower than what the dashboard shows. That gap is where the margin lives.
"The constraint moves. Fix the bottleneck on Line 3 and Line 5 becomes the new ceiling in six weeks."
Before / After · Tier 1 Automotive Stamping · Ohio
OEE Score
18-point recovery · 14 weeks
Unplanned Downtime
Per shift · Stamping line
Throughput
Daily output · Same headcount
Scrap Rate
First-pass yield improvement
Marcus Thibodeau
Lean Systems Principal · 18 yrs · Medical Device & Aerospace
Lean isn't a toolkit. It's a diagnostic language. Most failed rollouts are translation errors.
Q. Why do lean implementations stall at 60% of mid-market plants?
Because they start with tools instead of problems. A plant installs 5S on the shop floor, posts the visual boards, and calls it lean. But if you haven't mapped the value stream and identified the three or four process families that actually drive your cost structure, you're decorating a building that's on fire.
Q. Medical device manufacturing has different compliance pressures. Does lean still apply?
It applies more. FDA 21 CFR Part 820 and ISO 13485 both reward process stability and documented repeatability — which is exactly what lean delivers. The plants we've worked with in the device space saw their audit findings drop by 60% in the first year, not because they added documentation but because the processes became stable enough that documentation was accurate for the first time.
"A value stream map drawn wrong costs you the next 18 months. We've seen it. We've fixed it."
Before / After · Medical Device Housing · Minnesota
Lead Time
Order-to-ship · Device housing
WIP Inventory
Tied capital released
Audit Findings
ISO 13485 · Year 1
Labor Efficiency
Direct labor utilization
Priya Sundaram
Supply Chain & Reshoring Lead · 16 yrs · Industrial & Defense Supply Chain
The plants that survive the next decade aren't the ones with the lowest unit cost. They're the ones that can promise delivery.
Q. What's the real cost of a 14-week offshore lead time that most plants aren't calculating?
Inventory carrying costs, expedite freight when a shipment is late, the line stoppages when it's very late, and the customer penalties that don't show up in procurement's spreadsheet. When we do a full landed-cost model — and I mean full, not just unit cost plus duty — reshoring to a domestic supplier is within 8% of offshore cost for 60% of the part families we analyze. The risk premium covers the rest.
Q. Where should a plant start if they want to reduce single-source offshore exposure?
Classify your part families by lead time sensitivity and revenue impact. The top 20% — the ones where a 3-week delay stops your line — those are your reshoring candidates. Start there. You don't need to reshore everything. You need to reshore the parts that, when they're late, make your VP of Ops stop sleeping.
"Reshoring isn't patriotism. It's a margin decision once you price the risk correctly."
Before / After · Industrial Components · Michigan
Single-Source Parts
Of critical BOM items
Avg Lead Time
Critical assemblies
Expedite Freight
Annual spend reduction
On-Time Delivery
Customer-facing OTD
The operating playbook your COO will leave on the desk.
Three experts. Five manufacturing challenges. One framework that tells you exactly where your throughput is bleeding and what to do about it — before you spend a dollar on new equipment.
Free. No sales call unless you ask.
Forge Consulting Group · Detroit, MI
Engagements from 90 days · Mid-market specialists