This manufacturer had built decades of success across food, beverage, and household goods, but recent years told a harder story: successive years of financial losses. Like many consumer-goods producers, it was absorbing fluctuating demand, labor challenges, and pandemic-related supply-chain disruption, and together those pressures created significant and persistent production challenges.

Underneath the external pressure sat a structural blind spot. Senior management was operating on historical capacity rather than the operation’s actual capacity, which masked the production waste hiding inside everyday performance. Schedule attainment, customer delivery, and customer satisfaction all suffered from that low performance, while critical skills had eroded through retirement, turnover, and a sustained lack of training investment, leaving gaps across both operations and maintenance. Newly promoted frontline supervisors were consumed by daily firefighting and held to expectations set below what the operation could actually do.

The plant also lacked the information it needed to make decisions, forecast, execute, and evaluate. Line startups were poorly coordinated, communication between departments was weak, and maintenance ran reactively on a run-to-failure approach that produced unscheduled downtime. There were no proactive management processes, disciplines, or skills to support a performance-based culture. Leadership did not need a one-time fix; it needed a system that could expose true capacity and build the routines and skills to manage to it every shift.

POWERS treated this as a performance and execution challenge and built a cross-functional department productivity sprint around the moments that set each day: plant startups and shift handoffs. Working with maintenance and production partners, the team created standardized startup routines so lines came up the same coordinated way every shift rather than relying on improvised handoffs.

In parallel, POWERS calculated the actual business capacities so performance could be measured against what the operation could truly do instead of historical numbers. Critical skills gaps were identified and filled across frontline leadership and the workforce, and supervisors were trained and coached on behavior execution, performance standards, decision-making, and problem identification. Leaders were also taught to spot and remove the ineffective processes that were holding performance back.

As the standardized startups, proactive maintenance discipline, and newly capable supervisors took hold together, the plant gained the information and the routines it had been missing for decision-making, forecasting, execution, and evaluation. Performance climbed toward the actual capacity that had been there all along, and the gains compounded across lines and shifts.