Owners usually call me at a fork. Something in the operation is not keeping up with the business—delivery, cost, a plant manager who is leaving, a growth spurt that the current cadence cannot absorb—and it is not yet clear what kind of help is required. A full-time hire? An interim leader? A few days a week of senior attention? Or a tighter system the current team can run once someone helps them see it?
A short, fixed-scope diagnostic is how I like to answer that question. It should be useful even if we never work together again. If the only product of a diagnostic is a proposal for more of my time, it was a sales process, not a diagnostic.
A true picture of how the work flows
The first product is a clear description of how work actually moves through the business, not how the org chart or the procedure manual says it moves. I follow orders, issues, and decisions. I sit with the people who schedule, build, inspect, ship, and service the product. I look at the handoffs, the waits, and the places where a promise is made without a plan to keep it.
That picture should be recognizable to the people in the plant. If they read it and say, “that is not how it works here,” I have not finished. If they read it and say, “that is how it works here, and I wish it were not,” we have something we can use.
A short list of metrics worth managing
Most plants are not short on data. They are short on a few measures that a supervisor and an owner can look at together and trust. A diagnostic should name two or three operating metrics that matter for the next season of the business—usually a mix of safety, quality, delivery, and a cost or cash measure—and it should be honest about whether those numbers can be produced reliably today.
If the current reports take a heroic effort, part of the plan is to make the signal cheaper to see. I would rather start with a simple, slightly imperfect weekly number the team believes than with a dashboard no one opens.
A ninety-day plan the existing team can run
The plan should fit on a few pages. It should name a small number of outcomes, the weekly cadence that will drive them, who owns each piece, and what “good” looks like at day ninety. It should also name the things we are not going to do in that window. A plan that tries to fix the plant and the ERP and the org chart and the culture in a single quarter is not a plan. It is a wish.
The existing team has to be able to see themselves in it. If the plan only works when an outside operator is in the building five days a week, then we should say that plainly and talk about interim coverage. If the plan works with a couple of serious days of senior help and a stronger supervisor cadence, then fractional leadership may be the right next step. If the team can carry it with light support, the diagnostic has already done a lot of its job.
A recommendation about the shape of leadership
By the end of a diagnostic I should be able to give the owner a direct recommendation. Hire a full-time operations leader, because the seat is genuinely full. Bring in interim coverage, because the seat cannot sit empty while you search or stabilize. Retain fractional help, because the company needs senior judgment on a cadence, not another salaried day in the week. Or make a small set of changes with the people you already have, and check back.
That recommendation should follow from the work, not from a preferred product. I do this work for a living, and I will say so. I will also say when the company does not need me.
What a diagnostic is not
It is not an eighty-page report that no one rereads. It is not a benchmarking theater of industry averages with no bearing on your plant. It is not a disguised Lean deployment, and it is not a hunt for people to blame. A good diagnostic can be uncomfortable, because it makes informal arrangements visible. It should still leave the team with more dignity, and more clarity, than they had on the first day.
If you run a manufacturing or industrial company in Springfield, Southwest Missouri, or the wider Midwest and you are trying to decide what kind of operations help you actually need, this is the right place to start. You should walk away with a picture of the work, a short list of measures, a ninety-day plan, and a clear recommendation. If you would like that kind of look at your operation, I would be glad to talk.