Operations Consultants near you

The first phase is observation and measurement. That means time actually spent on the floor or listening to calls, plus extracting whatever the systems already record: job durations, touch counts, queue times, first-time-fix rates, scrap. Most Australian mid-sized operations hold far more usable data in their job management or ERP system than anyone has looked at.

The second phase is mapping and testing. The consultant maps the process as performed, not as documented, and the difference is usually where the finding lives. Changes are then trialled on one line, one crew or one branch, with the measure held constant, so the result can be attributed.

The third phase is rollout and handover, which should include the measurement itself. If the throughput dashboard only exists because the consultant was building it, the gains will drift back within a few months. Ask for the measurement to be built into a system your team already uses.

Changing a process changes the risk profile. Faster cycle times, new layouts, different lifting patterns, compressed rosters and new equipment all alter what can go wrong. Under the model work health and safety laws adopted across most Australian jurisdictions, a person conducting a business or undertaking has a primary duty of care, which includes a duty to consult workers on matters that may affect their health and safety.

That consultation duty is separate from the industrial consultation duty in awards and agreements. Both can apply to the same change. Safe Work Australia develops the model laws and the regulator in each state and territory enforces them, so check what applies where your sites are.

Practically, a change to a process should come with a reviewed risk assessment and a record of what workers were asked and what they said. An operations consultant who treats safety as a compliance appendix rather than a design input is a liability, especially where the productivity gain comes from speed.

The commonest illusion is moving work rather than removing it. A step disappears from the mapped process and reappears in another team's inbox. Measuring the whole flow rather than one function is the defence.

The second is a gain funded by overtime or by casuals. If cycle time improved because people worked longer, the cost per unit has not moved. Insist that labour cost includes penalty rates, overtime and casual loading, all of which come from the applicable award.

The third is a short measurement window that happened to catch a good month. Seasonality is strong in Australian operations, particularly anything tied to the summer trade, harvest or the end of the financial year. Agree the comparison period before the change, and compare like with like.

An operations consultant diagnoses and changes how work flows, and should leave with a measured result. A process improvement trainer teaches your staff a method and leaves the diagnosis to them, which is cheaper and slower and builds capability. A systems implementer configures software, which changes what is recorded but not necessarily what is done.

Buying a system to fix an operations problem is the classic expensive mistake. Automating a process that should be removed produces a faster version of the wrong thing and locks it in. Map first, remove what is unnecessary, then decide what to automate.

For businesses with several sites, a common sensible sequence is a consultant on one site to establish the method and the measures, then internal capability to roll it out, with the consultant reviewing rather than delivering.