04Automate
Every factory and warehouse has a bottleneck. Most people on the floor can tell you where it is.
We baseline the process first, then commit capital to a payback the business can see.
Automate in practice
Every factory and warehouse has a bottleneck, and most people on the floor can tell you where it is. What is harder is proving what removing it is worth, in time saved, output gained or labour released, before the capital is committed.
So we baseline first. Throughput, downtime, scrap, labour hours, lead time. Only then does it become a question of robotics, machine vision, material flow, or a different way of running the line. The technology is chosen last, against a payback the business can see.
We have owned a production business, so the case has to hold with our own capital behind it, and we have run automation and technology programmes inside large industrial and regulated organisations. That is why we start with the constraint rather than the catalogue.
What we do as owner
We start where the money is being lost, not where the technology is easiest to install. The baseline comes first, then the case, then the equipment.
The International Federation of Robotics puts Western Europe at a record 267 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, ahead of North America at 204. The businesses a UK manufacturer competes with automated years ago. International Federation of Robotics, 8 April 2026
Find the constraint6
- Baseline of throughput, labour, quality, downtime, scrap and flow
- Where the constraint sits, line by line and process by process
- Which constraints are physical and which are administrative
- Business case, capex and payback before commitment
- The downside case: what happens if volume, mix or labour cost move
- Whether the answer is automation at all, or a different way of running the line
Automate the work9
- Workflow automation and AI agents
- Document processing and service automation
- Robotics and production line automation
- Cobots where volume and mix do not justify full automation
- Machine vision and inspection
- Intralogistics and material flow
- Warehouse and picking automation
- Predictive maintenance where assets are material
- Back-office and finance process automation
Proving the result, then rolling out across sites6
- Deployment, ramp and stabilisation
- Running the old and new process in parallel until it holds
- Benefit tracking against the agreed baseline
- Maintenance, spares and the skills to keep it running
- A stop or continue decision at the end of the pilot, taken on the measured result
- Replication across sites and businesses
The people side4
- Who does what after the change, decided before the equipment arrives
- Redeployment and skills, planned with the technology rather than after it
- Consultation and transfer obligations where they apply
- Supervisors and engineers able to run it without the installer
Not selling? The same capability is available as an executive mandate. See Advisory