"Reese Partners helped Huhtamaki realize significant cost savings of over $2 million a year. The expertise provided by Reese Partners was superior to what we could have done internally, with respect to both quality and time. They brought an objective view that couldn't be replicated internally, worked within a tight timeline and presented what made the most sense given both current and future business trends."
"Reese Partners assessed our current state of effectiveness and efficiency at our Grant Park Engineering Center, benchmarked us to similar operations and recommended opportunities for improvement. They brought great industry knowledge that supported the benchmark, plus brought a fresh set of unbiased eyes to the assessment."
Business Case
A $750 million packaging manufacturer relied on an in-house tooling facility to fabricate hard tooling used in its production plants. As business grew, demands on the tooling facility increased, resulting in rising tooling costs, lengthening lead times and growing complaints from its sales organization that business was being lost to more nimble competitors. The company needed its tooling faster and cheaper, but was reluctant to invest in an expansion of this under-performing business unit.
Reese Partners Role
Reese Partners was brought in to work with senior management at the tooling facility to evaluate the operational cost structures, processes and systems within the organization. This evaluation included an operational analysis used to benchmark the facility to comparable operations. The analysis demonstrated in unambiguous terms that the machine shop within the tooling facility was uncompetitive, both in cost and lead times. Additional investigation by Reese Partners uncovered the underlying causes of the competitive deficiencies and proposed a number of recommendations to overcome them.
Client Success
Reese Partners assisted the company by developing, justifying and recommending specific plans to: » Restructure the entire tooling organization to realign it with the objectives of the company and its customers; » Eliminate non-value-added processes to reduce costs and expedite customer response time; and » Outsource portions of tool fabrication to a strategic partner while strengthening engineering and prototyping capabilities for more directed support of customer needs and for new business development.
Results
The company adopted and implemented many of Reese Partners' recommendations, which reduced tooling costs by nearly $1 million per year, freed up $0.5 million in working capital, avoided $1.8 million in expansion capital and reduced tooling lead times by amounts ranging from 30 to 40 percent.
