Demand for the client’s products was skyrocketing, but it was also unpredictable, and that combination put steady pressure on operational systems, processes, and behaviors that had been built and refined over many years. Management was trying to scale on paradigms that had worked for a long time, relying on the same systems, processes, and behaviors as they always had, and those approaches no longer held up at the volume the market was now asking for. The result was an operation that simply could not reliably satisfy its customers, with the holiday season approaching and an urgent need for more throughput.

Underneath the demand pressure sat a deeper structural problem. The company was absorbing a generational management transition: managers and frontline leaders with 20-plus years of tenure were preparing to retire and take their hard-won experience with them, and there were no One Point lessons learned captured at the execution level to hold any of that knowledge in place. Ham yield had been in steady decline for 75 weeks. Lost time was nearly equal to production time. And a ‘whatever it takes to get it out the door’ firefighting culture ran from the top floor to the shop floor, where heroics substituted for a system.

What leadership needed was not another push of effort or one more heroic holiday season. It needed a way to plan and forecast resources reliably, an established production schedule to replace the constant scramble, operational visibility into how the plant was actually performing, and frontline leaders equipped to hold the line after the most experienced people walked out the door. That meant building an operating system, not patching a single process, so performance could hold under peak demand rather than only on the plant’s best days.

POWERS started where the work happened, conducting line balance and SMED observations alongside production supervisors to see how the lines actually ran and where capacity was being lost to excess changeovers and firefighting. That floor-level view fed a SKU rationalization that purged 90 low-volume, low-margin items, simplifying the mix the operation had to schedule and produce. In parallel, POWERS worked with the planning department to build a capacity model for the operation, giving the business a credible way to plan and forecast resources that the shifting hot lists and the distrusted ERP could not provide.

With a clearer picture of true capacity, the focus shifted to execution and the leaders who run it. POWERS delivered training, development, and on-the-floor support for frontline leadership, the same leaders the generational transition was about to test, and improved short-interval scheduling, follow-up, and barrier identification at the supervisory level so issues were surfaced and closed rather than worked around. Lost-time capture was developed down to root cause, with concrete actions attached, replacing a culture where performance was never examined at the process or line level with one that learned from it.

The discipline held even when conditions turned against it. When the Omicron surge drove 25% absenteeism, POWERS ran line balances and staffed lines to minimum staffing so the plant kept producing through the disruption rather than reverting to chaos. Across the 28-week engagement, these moves compounded: a unified schedule and capacity model replaced the hot lists, frontline routines replaced heroics, and yield discipline replaced giveaway. The work reached break-even at week 16, and by week 27 the cumulative effect showed up in both the yield curve and the bottom line.