Suffering with a critical capacity, cost, quality, or service level problem in your manufacturing operations?❌ It’s eating up your time and energy.❌ It has turned your KPIs red.❌ It’s the topic of every meeting you are in.❌ And it’s taking too long to solve.You are not alone. Over the past decade I have seen this story everywhere, even in the very best performing operations.If this sounds familiar:❌ You’ve had the experts in and they haven’t solved it❌ Your team has brainstormed potential root causes and now have an action list with too many things to check❌ All of the proposed solutions take too long, are too expensive, or have no certainty that they will work Then you need to take a radically different approach to solving your problems. The best way I know of explaining this is with an analogy: Imagine your colleague thinks of a random number between 1-100 and you need to figure out what it is. Which of these might be the better question?➯ Is it 42?➯ Is it greater than 50?Repeatedly asking the first type of question (a guess) results in a long and demoralising journey to get to the answer (if you don't give up before getting it). And yet, all of the traditional problem solving approaches (Fishbone diagrams, 5 Whys, Brainstorming, and many more I am sure you can name) are based around guessing. They are designed to fail when facing tough problems.To solve tough problems quickly and reliably, whilst building belief and momentum - you will need to embrace the second type of question. We call this “Stop Guessing” and have built a bespoke problem solving approach around it.Having spent the past decade working with clients across Europe on 100s of manufacturing lines I have yet to see this approach come close to failing (and believe me it has been tested!). Here are some recent examples, all achieved in 60 days or less:📶 Eliminated a quality problem in a chemical facility that had resisted 10 years of attempts by a team of the industry’s leading experts to solve it📶 OTIF increased from 50% to perform consistently at 90%+ at mattress manufacturer📶 Increased output of a key production line by 20% at an electronics component manufacturer📶 Increased productivity of the best performing department of an automotive parts manufacturer by 25% despite a sales volumes dropping by a quarter in the same time periodCurious to learn more? stroudinternational.com/operationsIf you would simply like to talk – message me directly