When this matters
Losses like these tend to surface at one of four points.
01
The operating plan gets written before anyone has walked the floor.
02
A buyer or lender will find the gaps. It costs less to find them first.
03
Volume held, costs climbed, and every report says the business is fine.
04
A new COO or site lead inherits processes nobody wrote down.
What we usually find
Ask a planner what they do before the Monday meeting. The answer usually tells you more than the ERP does.
01
In a lot of operations, month-end close runs three days longer than it should and some orders ship expedited every week. At some point these stopped being problems and became budget lines. We trace each one back to where it starts and put a number on it.
02
Most plants have someone who knows why a machine jams or which supplier ships short. That knowledge usually isn't written down, and it leaves when they do. We interview them, write down how the work gets done, and turn it into procedures the rest of the team can use.
03
When a business changes hands, the new owner writes the operating plan quickly, often before anyone has walked the floor or talked to the supervisors. If that is where you are, we map how work moves between sites, systems and people early, while the plan can still change.
What a diagnostic turns up
Three days on site. Thirty or more interview sessions across every level of the operation, and every finding traced to the sessions that raised it.
G1
Spend and controls no one had looked at as one picture.
$4M+/yr
F-04 · 5 sessions
in recurring spend across sites that no one owned. A single spend report surfaced it.
Found in spend review
8 in 10
F-11 · 8 sessions
purchases came before the requisition, so the bid control the process exists for never ran.
Raised across interviews
$2.5M/yr
F-19 · 12 sessions
in fixes identified for the first 90 days: five process changes and one license decision.
Identified
G2
Skilled people carried the data between platforms by hand.
Up to 40%
F-23 · 9 sessions
of skilled staff time went to re-keying data between systems, as supervisors, office managers and accountants described it.
Reported in interviews
6
F-31 · 6 sessions
versions of the same daily operating number, reconciled by hand each morning before anyone could answer the question.
Observed
2 weeks
F-36 · 4 sessions
before a new hire appeared in the scheduling system, so schedulers rebuilt each profile by hand.
Observed
G3
Several functions would stall if one person was out.
7
F-42 · 7 sessions
functions ran on undocumented knowledge held by one or two people, including financial statement production.
Observed
1
F-47 · 5 sessions
role carried billing, receivables, collections and records with no documented backup.
Observed
The cost of waiting
$6M/yr × 10x = $60M
annual leakage × EBITDA multiple = enterprise value
Leakage nobody reports does not stay on the P&L. Every year it runs, a buyer prices it into the exit.
Why Archer Key
Our founders come from military logistics, defense manufacturing and global supply chains. Each part of that background shows up in how we run an engagement.
Military logistics
We learned logistics on the Air Force KC-135 fleet, where readiness depends on every part, person and schedule lining up. We trace the dependencies that can stop your work. Our CEO also holds an active TS clearance. That matters when the supply chain is a defense supply chain.
Defense manufacturing
Defense production runs on controlled, written procedures. We bring that standard to documenting how your operation really works, so the knowledge stays when people leave. Six Sigma Black Belt training means we measure the problem before we name a cause.
Lean at scale
One of our founders led a lean program at a global manufacturer that delivered more than $11M a year. We design fixes the operators can run on their own after we leave.
Both sides of the supply chain
We have run vendor relationships and data-sharing programs between manufacturers and national retailers. We know where information stalls between companies, and what it costs when it does.
How an engagement works
Every engagement starts with the diagnostic, for a fixed fee. At the end of each step you get something you keep, and you decide whether to go on. The people who find the problems are the same people who fix them.
01
We read what you already have: org charts, procedures, reports. Then we interview the people who do the work, from operators to the leadership team, until we can draw how the operation runs today. That includes the side spreadsheets and the steps that only live in someone's head.
Deliverable
A map of your operation: where systems connect, who makes which decisions, where information stops, and which knowledge sits with one person.
02
We score every problem on the map by what it costs and how much schedule risk it carries. Leadership gets a short list in priority order, each item with an owner and a first step.
Deliverable
A ranked list of problems with the dollar exposure behind each one.
03
We put the fix in place: the procedure, the measure, who owns it, and the point at which someone has to act. Your operators help design it, so they understand it and keep it running after we leave.
Deliverable
Written procedures, an owner for each measure, and tracking on the problems found in step 01.
04
Some fixes need software. When they do, we write it ourselves, using what we learned in the interviews, so the tool matches how your people already work.
Deliverable
A tool built around your process, handed over to your team.
What the diagnostic answers
We check where each key number comes from and how often it is wrong. When a number is wrong, the cause is usually a step upstream of the report.
We follow orders and requests across handoffs and time how long they sit between steps.
We compare the documented procedure with what people actually do, workarounds included.
We find the knowledge only one person has and estimate what losing it would cost.