For a category-leading consumer baked goods producer, the production lines were the business, and they were not holding. Equipment failed consistently enough that uptime stalled at 69% and overall equipment effectiveness sat at 63.5%, while the daily startup routine the plant called Power Hour got the lines running cleanly only half the time. Schedule attainment was no stronger at 50%. None of these were one-bad-day numbers; they were the steady state, and they capped what the plant could ship.

Underneath the metrics was a system that depended on the right people being in the right place. Startup support was inconsistent and leaned on tribal knowledge held by a limited set of technicians, and pre-flight forms were outdated or simply absent on some lines, so each shift improvised its way to running. Roles and responsibilities were ambiguous and leaders drifted from best practices. There were no consistent metrics for measuring supervisor success, supervisors were often not on the shop floor, and leadership follow-up was inconsistent, which left no reliable way to see a problem or own it.

Maintenance compounded the drag. Technician evaluations were outdated and infrequent, leaving critical skills gaps, and preventative-maintenance tasks were published with little follow-up or accountability, so the plant stayed in a reactive, run-to-failure posture. Daily touchpoints were scarce, departments worked in silos, and modern tools like Tableau went underused. Leadership did not need a one-time fix to any single line; it needed a system that made reliable startups, proactive maintenance, and supervisor accountability the way the plant ran every day.

POWERS treated the engagement as a leadership and reliability problem, not a single-line repair. Weekly planning and scheduling meetings were established so resources were allocated deliberately rather than scrambled for, and frontline leaders were shifted from reactive firefighting to proactive management. Roles and responsibilities were defined clearly across leadership tiers so ownership was no longer ambiguous, and a comprehensive mechanic skills baseline assessment exposed where the critical gaps actually were.

In parallel, the operating discipline was rebuilt around routines that ran the same way every day. Standardized leader work and structured 1:1 meetings gave supervisors a consistent cadence and made their performance visible, while unplanned work was recorded and PM frequencies were refined through continuous feedback loops, moving maintenance from run-to-failure toward genuinely preventative. Tableau and Redzone were put to work for data-driven decisions, and the Fiix CMMS system was fully integrated so maintenance planning, execution, and accountability lived in one place.

Together these changes pulled reliability under daily management. Startups became repeatable instead of improvised, supervisors were on the floor and accountable to clear metrics, and maintenance shifted from reacting to failures toward preventing them, which is what let the plant convert its low baselines into sustained, measurable gains and savings that ran past the engagement’s own target.