Restructuring a 200-person manufacturer
We redesigned how a 200-person manufacturer worked after a decade of growth.
Client
Timeline
4 months
Services
Business Transformation
The situation
Meridian Manufacturing had grown from 50 to 200 people over ten years — entirely through organic growth. The org chart had never really been redesigned. It had just accumulated layers. By the time leadership called us decisions were taking weeks that should take days, three different teams were doing the same work without knowing it, and two of their best managers had resigned in the same month.
The problem
The org chart said one thing. The way work actually got done said something completely different. Nobody had clear ownership of anything. Every decision required sign-off from three people who weren't sure they should be signing off. The company was spending more energy managing itself than serving its customers.
What we did
We spent three weeks mapping how decisions actually got made — not how the org chart said they should be made. We interviewed 40 people across the business from the factory floor to the executive team. What we found was predictable but important: the structure had been designed for a 50-person company and nobody had noticed it stop working.
We redesigned the operating model around the company's actual workflows — not an industry template. We created clear ownership for every major decision, eliminated the overlapping responsibilities that were causing friction, and built a simple governance model that kept the executive team focused on the right things.
The results
200
person restructure completed
35%
Improvement in decision making speed
18%
Reduction in operation cost
