A UK precision electronics manufacturer with sites in the UK, Central Europe and the USA | Ten months, November 2025 to September 2026
This was a technically respected, profitable and well funded business that had grown on speed, instinct and a healthy dislike of bureaucracy. That culture built it. It was also starting to cost it. Quality was treated as an overhead rather than part of how the business competed, a major customer had flagged a gap in the supply chain, and nobody could say what poor quality was actually costing. The board wanted to move from respected technical specialist to a disciplined, scalable organisation without losing the agility that had got it there.
What we worked on
The first job was a diagnostic: interviews across the sites, a maturity assessment of the quality system, and a cost of quality model built with the finance team. The answer was about £2m a year, over four per cent of revenue, and only around five per cent of that spend was going on prevention. That number did more to move the board than any argument about process.
The board case was built around why, not how. Once it was accepted, I facilitated a two day workshop with the senior leadership team that turned discovery into delivery, with four workstreams: a total quality operating model across the three sites, a people development framework, a leadership culture programme, and a redesign of how quality was governed and owned. The principle throughout was education first. Managers had to understand and agree the direction before anything was implemented, and every change was framed as protecting the speed of the business rather than slowing it down.
Alongside this we put a supplier code of conduct and onboarding process in place, and I ran the search for an interim Group Head of Quality: the brief, the shortlist, the interviews and the contract structure, with the appointment made on a deliverables basis.
What changed
The board approved and funded the programme. The cost of quality is now measured and owned at board level rather than guessed at. An interim Group Head of Quality started in September with a nine month mandate to deliver the operating model, bring the cost of poor quality under sustained measurement and build a permanent successor. The people and culture work, including the leadership handbook, the future leaders programme and the engagement survey follow up, is being run by the internal team. The supplier code of conduct is in use.
My brief was to build the case, get the programme agreed and funded, put the structure and the people in place to deliver it, and step back. That is done. The business now has the plan, the number and the person to carry it through.