This supplier had grown through strategic mergers and acquisitions into one of the country’s largest industrial lumber wholesalers and custom wood-packaging operations, with more than 30 facilities nationwide. Growth by acquisition brought capacity, but it also brought inconsistency: management processes were inefficient, supervision varied site to site, and production delays surfaced wherever the operating discipline was weakest. The problem was structural, not local.

At Site 1, the symptoms were stacked on top of one another. Management systems were inadequate, active supervision was largely absent, the management structure was poorly defined, and planning and scheduling were inefficient. The consequences showed up directly in the numbers: on-time delivery ran below 80%, and labor costs were consistently over budget.

Site 2 told a different version of the same story. Staffing shortages drove frequent schedule break-ins and disrupted production flow, the site consistently missed its budgeted margins, and it could not pull its weight in the broader production network, which created bottlenecks at other facilities that depended on it. Leadership did not need a one-time cleanup at either site. It needed a management operating system that would run the same way on every shift and could then be repeated across the rest of the network.

POWERS started by building a common foundation across the sites: standardized management tools running on the Plan Actual Variance Action (PAVA) system, which let managers steer operations hour by hour with real-time visibility, paired with structured daily and weekly meetings that put the right data in front of leaders so they could act proactively rather than after the fact. With that operating system in place, the site-specific work could move in parallel.

At Site 1, POWERS introduced a new planning and scheduling process that ran end to end, from cutting through building to shipment, using job packets to ensure the correct quantities were built at the right time with the appropriate labor allocated. That tightened timelines and stripped out labor waste at its source. At Site 2, the focus shifted to staffing and equipment efficiency: staffing levels were adjusted to support maximum equipment utilization, and a root-cause-analysis initiative was run to identify and eliminate the lost-time sources that had been draining productivity.

A third site extended the program further. POWERS designed a new plant layout that freed up 5,000 square feet of production space and improved material flow without adding resources, and refined on-the-floor data collection so performance could be tracked down to the individual item and labor resource. Together these changes turned inconsistent, M&A-inherited operations into a repeatable management discipline, and that repeatability is what allowed the tools and processes to be deployed across 20 additional sites.