Planning a facility expansion is a major investment in time and money. CDE Design Solutions' managing director Peter Sackett outlines how to ensure your project is a success.
One minute you think you have your business sorted; your product is selling well, your ranges are well received, your sales team are working in sync, your branding is on point, and it looks like you’ll turn a profit this financial year.
And then comes the call: your customer says they need three million units of your product on their shelves next year, which exceeds your current annual output by 50 per cent.
That one phone call elevates you into a completely new tier of business – you’re now considered part of the big league – if you can make it work. Granted, this is a great problem to have but it’s a problem none-the-less.
The calm you felt only a few short hours earlier has flown out the window, leaving you staring down the barrel of a seemingly endless list of new priorities, the largest one being how on earth you are going to transform your current factory footprint into a manufacturing powerhouse.
While this may seem like a fanciful story, this and many iterations of the scenario are the catalyst for businesses to approach CDE Design Solutions for a realistic solution.
What happens next
To ensure that priority list converts to product on the shelves and sales in the bank, you have two critical and inextricably linked decisions to make.
1. Partnership
This is not the time to be reaching for a consulting firm to outsource your project. Instead, it is time to look for a partner that has worked with many operators just like you.
They will be vested in your outcomes, have solutions to the factory design problems you never knew you had, and will walk and work with you as part of your team. They might even act as your team for the duration of the project.
When deciding on your factory design partner:
Choose a multi-faceted business with multiple streams of in-house engineering and technical knowledge. You may not need to work directly with the whole team but knowing that your project lead is supported with diverse knowledge behind the scenes is worth more than you can calculate;
choose a flexible business that will work with your existing engineering team or as your engineering team. One that can fill the gaps in your team’s expertise or work on or off site as your factory design team;
choose a partner that you like. You don’t need to be best friends, but factory design projects are intense and stressful and involve many moving parts – you want to be working with someone you like – again this is worth so much more than you’d expect; and
choose experience. Your factory design partner needs to show longevity and success across multiple and diverse projects, customers, industries, and solutions.
2. Scope
There will be a world of pain coming your way if you undercook, overlook, or underestimate the scope of your project. By ensuring your project is scoped correctly, you minimise the risk of project creep.
Project creep and its detrimental knock-on effects are fundamentally caused by the project lead and/or the engineering firm having insufficient knowledge, which often stems from a lack of scoping questions at the beginning of the project.
According to the Project Management Institute’s Pulse of the Profession report, more than 52 per cent of projects experience scope creep.
When scoping your factory design project there are no shortcuts or “near enough is good enough” approaches.
The only way to ensure scoping success is experience. Nothing trumps experience if you want your project to be finished on time and within budget.
Looking ahead
CDE Design Solutions have been solving factory design problems for manufacturing companies for more than 20 years, measuring its success by the success of its clients.
It fosters long term partnerships with family businesses that become household names as well as multinationals that have long been part of the Australian FMCG landscape.
CDE’s longevity is built on choosing clients with shared values, elevating a relationship from commercial transaction to partnership. Being vested in its clients’ goals results in success for all involved.
This article first appeared in the August/September edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.
