Client stories
Notes from manufacturing variance audits — what we found, what was awkward, and what changed afterward.
These accounts use composite details where clients asked for anonymity. Each reflects a real engagement pattern from our practice.
They traced our copper usage variance to a drawing revision that never reached the press shop. Finance had been arguing with purchasing for two months over the same line.
The draft report was denser than I wanted, and I said so in the workshop. They shortened the narrative and kept the scrap-ticket appendix intact. The board conversation lasted twelve minutes.
We only booked the material review. They found our scrap cage was being emptied without codes on night shift — not a BOM problem at all. Mild sting to the ego, useful for the next standards meeting.
Labour efficiency looked terrible until they separated waiting time misposted as productive hours. HR disliked the finding; operations recognised it immediately.
Extended story: absorbing a quiet quarter
A New Territories metal-finishing plant asked us to probe overhead absorption after three soft months left under-absorbed overhead sitting in cost of sales. Volume had dropped, but the overhead rate still assumed prior-year machine hours.
We rebuilt the absorption bridge, sampled inventory adjustments that had been used to “smooth” the gap, and walked the plating line with the supervisor who owned the downtime log. The final memo recommended a mid-year rate reset and a cut-off rule for inventory returns that had been posting into the variance account after month-end.
The finance team accepted the rate reset. Operations pushed back on the inventory cut-off for two weeks, then adopted it once a late return caused a visible spike. Not every recommendation landed on day one — and that honesty mattered more than a tidy slide.