Operations and margin
Six points of gross margin back in eleven months.
A component maker grew sales for four years while margin slid. We found where it went and fixed the biggest leaks first.
+6.2 pts
gross margin in 11 months
Industry
Industrial components manufacturing
Size
140 people · $19M revenue
Service
Operations and margin
Engagement
Diagnostic, Roadmap, then a 3-month Partnership
Duration
11 months to result
Before and after
Gross margin
Before
31.4%
After
37.6%
Time to send a quote
Before
9 days
After
2 days
Product lines losing money
Before
4
After
0
The challenge
Brightwell’s sales had grown 22% over four years, but gross margin had slipped from 36% to 31.4%. The owners suspected pricing. Their ERP could only report margin for the company as a whole, and every quote was built by hand from a spreadsheet that two people understood.
What we did
We began with a two-week diagnostic. Tomás rebuilt margin by product line and by customer from 18 months of invoices, freight and rework records. Four of the company’s twelve product lines lost money once rework and freight were counted, and two customers made up 41% of revenue.
The six-week roadmap that followed set four moves: reprice two lines, retire one, cut rework on the fourth, and replace the hand-built quoting spreadsheet with a standard price book. A three-month partnership came next, with Amit working alongside the plant manager to bring rework down and train two estimators on the new price book.
What changed
Eleven months after kickoff, gross margin stood at 37.6%, up 6.2 points and worth about $1.2M a year on $19M of revenue. Quotes now go out in two days instead of nine. Brightwell lost one low-margin customer and gained the capacity to take on better work.
In their words
“Our margin problem had been ‘known’ for years. Tallis put a number on every leak and told us which three to fix first. We got six points back in under a year.”
Marcus Hale
COO, Brightwell Manufacturing
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