Most operations improvement programmes chase the wrong target. They focus on effort, hours, and headcount — when the real constraint is in how the system is designed, not how hard people are working.
The constraint that limits your throughput is rarely where you think it is. It is almost never the team. It is almost always a structural issue in how work flows through the system — a scheduling assumption, a batch size, a handover point, a measurement that creates the wrong behaviour.
We find the real constraint first. Then we remove it. Then we find the next one.
Every deliverable is designed to hold after we leave — without ongoing support from Berg Partners.
Identifying the real bottleneck — not the perceived one — and redesigning the system around it. We track leading indicators, not lagging ones, so problems are visible before they become losses.
Rebuilding the production sequence, batch sizes, and handover points to eliminate the waiting and rework that accumulates invisibly in most operations over time.
Building the routines — the shift handovers, the daily reviews, the escalation triggers — that keep performance visible and problems surfaced before they compound.
Moving from reactive to predictive maintenance — designing the inspection routines, failure mode analysis, and spare parts strategy that turns asset reliability into a managed variable.
A mid-sized Austrian packaging manufacturer had flat OEE for three years despite two improvement programmes. The real constraint was not on the production floor — it was in the scheduling logic that created artificial starvation at the bottleneck station. We found it in week two. The improvement held for 18 months after we left.
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