Person

Four Places the Margin Leaks

FN Farrah Nassar

This is the short version of what I look for and what I have found, put together from six years of diagnostics. I have taken client names off anything that was not agreed in writing, but the numbers are real numbers. If you run a unit and any of this sounds like your floor, that is not a coincidence. These four leaks show up almost everywhere, in roughly this order of size.

01 Week one, before any spreadsheet

What I do for the first five days of an engagement, and why I refuse to start with the accounts.

Three shifts, one clipboard

I work every shift the unit runs, including the night, before I make a single claim about the operation.

The night shift is where the truth about a factory lives. Different supervisor, thinner staffing, no owner in the building, and a completely different set of workarounds. If a consultant has only seen your day shift, they have seen the version of your unit that is prepared for visitors. What I record in week one: actual changeover times, timed with a phone, not the standard from the manual. Where material physically sits and how far it travels. What gets re-run and where those parts go. Which machines the operators quietly avoid. Who people actually ask when something breaks, which is usually not the person on the org chart. I do not take notes on people's speed in front of them. That was the mistake I made at twenty three and it poisoned six months of a job.

The costing sheet nobody has opened

In eleven of my last fourteen engagements, the unit was pricing against a material rate that was more than a year stale.

Somebody built the costing sheet once, usually a relative with a commerce degree, usually well. Then material prices moved, a new machine came in, the product mix shifted, and nobody updated the sheet because nobody owned it. The result is that the unit is confident about which products make money and the confidence is wrong. I have seen a stitching unit push hard on the item that was losing them eleven rupees a piece because it had the highest revenue per order. First thing I ask for is the sheet and the date it was last edited. The file modification date tells me more about a business than the balance sheet does.
02 Two engagements, start to finish

Real numbers from two units that agreed to let me publish them, one packaging plant and one sheet metal co-op.

Packaging unit, Vasai, 2024

94 people, corrugated boxes. Overtime had been a permanent line item for four years. We cut it by 61 percent without reducing output.

They were running roughly 2,100 overtime hours a month and had concluded they needed to hire. What they actually had was a scheduling problem: two of the four converting machines were set up for the same order type, so the queue bunched every Wednesday and got cleared with Saturday work. We changed three things. Order release moved from daily to a two day horizon with a written rule for which machine takes which board grade. Changeover kit was moved to the machines instead of the tool room, which took four minutes off each setup. And the Saturday shift was ended outright so the schedule had to hold. Overtime hours went to about 820 a month by the fourth month. Output was flat. Two supervisors now run the release meeting without me and have changed the rules twice since, both times correctly.

Sheet metal co-op, Wagle Estate, 2025

210 members. Scrap was reported at two percent and was actually nine. Recovery worth about 3.4 lakh a month.

The re-run bin sat behind the press and never touched a form. Parts that failed first pass got quietly re-pressed on the second shift, so the scrap number in the report was the number of parts thrown away, not the number of parts made twice. We weighed everything for a week. Then we put a tag on the re-run bin, one line per part, and made the second shift supervisor sign it. That alone dropped the volume, because visibility does most of the work. The underlying cause was a die that needed regrinding and a feed setting that two operators had been correcting by hand for a year. Nobody had told anyone because nobody had asked, and because the person who noticed it first had been shouted at about a different thing.
03 Tools I leave behind

Everything I build during an engagement stays with the unit, in a form their own people can maintain. Some of it is public.

The costing template I rebuild in every engagement, blank and free to download, with the Marathi labels included.

🔗Job costing sheet, blank versionkaaramadvisory.in↗

Two trained people, tested

I do not close an engagement until two people inside the unit can rebuild the costing sheet in front of me without help.

This is written into our contract. The last instalment is not invoiced until two named employees, chosen by the unit and not by me, sit down with a blank sheet and a month of production data and produce a costing that I agree with. It fails about a quarter of the time on the first attempt, and we do another two days of training. It has never failed twice. The reason is simple. A consultant who leaves behind a file leaves behind nothing. A consultant who leaves behind two people who can rebuild the file has actually changed the unit.