Operational assessment and action plan · Executive leadership · A company, division or multiple sites
Improve your operations. Your costed action plan in four weeks.
Reduce lead times, costs and bottlenecks between departments. Our partners cross-check team interviews and company data to identify causes and quantify potential gains. You receive a prioritised action plan with owners, budgets and expected results. We can then support implementation.
4 weeks
From scoping to final presentation
Fixed fee
Agreed at the scoping stage
All-senior team
No junior consultants
Everyone in scope
Everyone is invited
01 — THE CHALLENGE
Understand what holds back
your results.
Further reading: organisational assessment.
EBIT, lead times, quality, turnover: your indicators show the gaps. They do not always explain the causes. Your teams know the waits, duplicate entry and decisions that slow work down. But each department sees only part of the picture.
The operational assessment brings together accounts and company data. You understand how bottlenecks accumulate across departments, what they cost and which actions to prioritise.
02 — THE SCOPE
Your entire company
or a specific scope.
A company, division, factory, function or several sites: we agree the scope together. We follow work across departments to find where it slows down, repeats or stops. We examine four aspects of operations.
1
How work actually gets done
We compare procedures with daily work: time spent on core tasks, activities that divert teams and effort spent compensating for organisational problems.
2
Handovers
One department can meet its targets while slowing down the next. We identify waits, missing information and rework that extend lead times and reduce margins.
3
Tools and data
Do tools deliver the expected gains? We identify scattered information, manual reconstruction and management data that is hard to verify.
4
Decisions
Who actually decides, on which issues and how quickly? We identify approvals escalated too far, unanswered decisions and their cost to teams.
03 — EXAMPLE ACTION PLAN
A full order book.
Aircraft waiting on the ground.
An anonymised example from an independent aircraft maintenance provider.
Aircraft maintenance: 251 people invited, 230 interviews in three days, 187 improvement proposals and 23 commercial opportunities.
Three bottlenecks account for an estimated €2.1m/year in direct costs, at the lower end of the range. The first consumes 6.2 hours per technician per week: document searches, maintenance check preparation and trips to the stores.
The assessment also reveals a bottleneck absent from leadership’s priorities: after inspection, quoting and approval depend on two people. Until the quote is sent and accepted, the aircraft occupies a hangar slot and work waits.
The plan proposes three workstreams and five decisions. Potential gains reach €1.1–1.3m/year at 12 months, with estimated cumulative gains of €3m for €490k in implementation costs. Three new service opportunities also warrant testing, based on customer needs reported by teams.
1
A five-page brief for your executive team
Strengths to preserve. Bottlenecks, their causes and estimated cost. Three to five workstreams in launch order, each with an owner, budget, deadline and expected gain. The decisions your executive team needs to make.
2
The report and supporting evidence
Each finding links to supporting accounts and data. The report states its frequency, conservative cost estimate and what still needs checking.
3
The action sequence
Actions ranked by impact and effort. You know which to launch, defer or rule out.
4
Tasks to automate
What AI or automation can take on, activity by activity, and what needs to be in place.
5
Growth opportunities
For each opportunity raised in interviews: the customer need, supporting evidence, your ability to meet it, economic potential and the first test to run.
05 — OUR APPROACH
Four steps,
in four weeks
From scoping to final presentation, with your teams and our partners.
Further reading: process mapping.
Week 01
Define the scope and decisions to prepare
Together, we agree the scope, project owners, useful documents and decisions to prepare. We define the questions for teams and set the fixed fee.
Week 02
Listen across all teams within scope
Everyone within scope is invited to an individual, anonymous interview with Aria, by text or voice. Each person describes bottlenecks, dependencies between teams, practices that work and proposed improvements. Participation exceeds 85% on every engagement. Our partners analyse the anonymised interviews.
Week 03
Identify causes and quantify their effects
Our partners connect bottlenecks to identify their causes. They quantify the effects on costs, lead times and capacity, then rank the actions to take.
Week 04
Present the plan and agree priorities
You receive your action plan: actions, owners, budgets, deadlines and expected gains, including automation opportunities. The five-page brief covers the essentials; the report and appendices detail the analysis. We review the plan with your executive team to agree priorities.
06 — WHO IT IS FOR, AND WHEN
Executive leadership of a mid-sized company or division
You have invested and hired, but results have not followed. Each department gives a different explanation.
Operations or site leadership
Lead times grow despite hiring. Overtime compensates for bottlenecks you want to resolve.
Executive and business development leadership
Your teams see customer needs that your offer does not yet meet.
Leaders starting a new role, or following an acquisition
Test your priorities against your teams’ experience to build your first 100-day plan.
Finance leadership
Margins are falling and the accounts do not explain the operational causes.
Investment funds
Prepare a portfolio company’s first hundred days or assess its progress during ownership.