Operational reviews, planning, automation and AI.

Because inventory is an outcome, not a lever. It is the result of demand uncertainty, planning rules, lead times and execution discipline all interacting. Pulling stock down across the board cuts cover on the lines you need while leaving capital tied up in the ones you do not. The fix is to tune replenishment, MRP settings and demand signals per line, which is how you bring both numbers down together. At Earlee Products this moved stockouts down 27% and stock cover down 13% at the same time.

An ERP is excellent at recording what happened. That does not make it a decision-support system. Most reporting looks backwards, and planning latency, meaning how fast the organisation recognises change and responds to it, is usually a week or more. The gap is not the ERP, it is the planning layer on top of it and the discipline around how people transact in it.

We target fast, measurable payback rather than multi-year programmes. The transactional supply automation build for FLSmidth broke even in five weeks and returned 10:1 on the purchase order component alone within three months of go-live. Timeframes depend on scope, but if a piece of work cannot pay for itself quickly we will say so before you commit.

A Centre of Business consultant runs it. We sit with the people who take the orders, make the plan and run the floor, map how work actually flows, and argue the numbers they already fight over. You get a sequenced roadmap of what to fix first and what it is worth. Then we stay and manage the project that roadmap creates until your team can run it. The five reviews companies ask for are S&OP Readiness, a Manufacturing Plant Review, a General Business Overview, delivery reliability, and an AI Check.

$5,000 +GST for each review. For a limited number of customers, the first one is free. That is the consultant-led review and the sequenced roadmap. The project that follows is scoped separately.

We implement. Strategy consultants hand over a plan and leave. We design the improvement, then build the dashboards, applications and automation behind it, integrated with your ERP, and stay until your team can run it without us. That is the difference between a report and a change that holds.

Manufacturers and distributors, with particular depth in food, FMCG and inventory-heavy operations. Clients include FLSmidth, Earlee Products (the FIAQ 2023 Queensland Manufacturer of the Year) and Vege Chips. We work Australia-wide, both on-site and remotely.

It helps where the work is high-volume, rules-based and currently manual. A concrete example we have delivered: reading incoming customer purchase orders, validating them against pricing and customer records, then formatting the result for load into the ERP as a sales order. That is a real task, done many times a day, with a measurable time saving. We would not recommend AI where a simpler automation does the job.

Ninety minutes, no cost and no obligation. You tell us what is happening in your operation now and what your goal is. We ask questions, and you leave with a prioritised view of what is holding your delivery performance back. If you would rather see software than talk consulting, we will walk you through our planning platform, CheckSetGo or the Safety Reporting System instead.