Overhead and efficiency: cost transformation for a building fixtures manufacturer
BUILDING PRODUCTS AND MANUFACTURING · COST · OPERATING MODEL
The situation
A leading manufacturer and distributor of building fixtures and fittings ran a decentralised corporate structure across three manufacturing divisions, with bloated administrative overhead. Non-value-adding activity, uncoordinated sales structures, fragmented customer-service hubs, and product-development leakage were squeezing margins.
The work
We diagnosed the overhead base and redesigned the support model.
Mapped a $94.5 million addressable overhead base across the divisions against internal and global peer benchmarks.
Profiled sales-territory demand and customer-service idle time to find productivity variation across states.
Audited siloed vendor management to design unified contracts and a standard electronic data interchange architecture.
Overhauled an immature, product-centric new-product estimation process with risk-gated financial models tied to marketing-channel objectives.
The outcome
$12.5 million in annual overhead savings, a thirteen per cent cut across the addressable base.
52 roles reallocated into client-facing work.
A thirty-four per cent cut in order-management processing cost through geographic call-centre aggregation.
$4.4 million of field-sales productivity recovered by correcting territory coverage and widening management spans, half of administrative leakage removed with phone-despatch controls, and $425,000 saved by moving in-store merchandising to a single agency model.