“Forget about your competitors, just focus on your customers.” – Jack Ma

A business I worked with had experienced significant growth in sales by introducing its products to new customers and markets. The success in growing sales pushed the manufacturing facility past capacity, so some parts of the fabrication process had been moved to a second facility. This move was simply not enough to support future sales growth so the management team explored various opportunities to increase capacity.

After considering options, management decided to build a new facility and relocate all manufacturing and supporting operations there. The transition to the new facility required more than just management of the logistics. We had an experienced operations team managing both the construction of the new facility and relocation of existing operations. The bigger challenge was how sustain a larger facility with significant capacity for growth?

Imagination

Whilst this situation wasn’t exactly “field of dreams” stuff, we still had the opportunity to grow the market by displacing other products with our own. Rather than focus on our existing competitors and risking a price war in an attempt to grow market share, we explored ways to make our customers more successful by understanding their operational issues and developing solutions to resolve them with longer operating life cycles and lower total cost of ownership.

Looking beyond the existing demand for our products, we were able to identify customer processes where we could displace older technology with fully engineered solutions, and in turn grow the total market for our products. By being imaginative we were able to create product offerings which would not be easy to replicate in the short or even medium term.

Engagement

With a better understanding of customer needs and new opportunities identified, we increased our engagement with customers to sell our expanded capability and generate advance orders. Rather than adopt a traditional approach to client engagement, with meetings with key customers led by senior management, we adopted a more adaptive style to increase the level of engagement between members of the engineering group and operational level employees on the customer side.

The multi-level engagement approach provided us with deeper insight into customer needs and helped to rapidly identify opportunities to improve our service offering. By opening up dialogue between our engineers and our customers’ technical and operation staff, our engineers were able to understand their needs at an earlier stage and develop solutions faster and more effectively. With the knowledge acquired we were ultimately able to generate orders to leverage the increased capacity of the new plant.

Growing pains

The increased capacity of the new facility also necessitated a review of sales and support operations. Sales, engineering and production were integrated into the new facility to ensure a singular focus on developing value-based solutions for our customers. But we had another challenge to address … growing demand for our product whilst meeting the increase in orders with new hires who would have to be trained and take time to be productive.

With an increase in the proportion of inexperienced people on the floor we saw a short-term drop in productivity which impacted our capacity to deliver on time. Rather than throw more people at the problem, we focused on the implementation of Lean Manufacturing principles which delivered innovative production practices. Within six months of opening the new facility, productivity in the plant was already returning to levels prior to the move, and within a year were well ahead of the old facility.

The Outcome

The new facility presented opportunities to both increase sales in our traditional market and at the same time open the door to new markets and applications. By considering our customers pinch points, developing solutions with them, and implementing new production practices we created new sales opportunities and doubled output within a year of opening.