Most foreign-owned plants in Brazil do not fail on technology. They fail because nobody at headquarters can see what is actually happening on the shop floor, and the local team has no routine that surfaces it.
Request Free Diagnostic →A plant in Brazil reports monthly numbers that look plausible. Output is roughly on target, headcount is stable, and the variances are explained after the fact. Then a customer complaint or a stockout reveals that the line has been running at half its rated speed for weeks, and nobody escalated it because no routine existed to escalate it.
This is the most common pattern we find in mid-size plants under foreign ownership. The issue is rarely competence. It is that production planning lives in one person's spreadsheet, shift handovers are verbal, downtime is recorded only when it is dramatic, and the supervisor layer was promoted for technical skill without ever being trained to manage.
Factory management is the layer that makes a plant legible. Without it, every improvement project you fund from abroad is built on numbers you cannot verify.
We replace spreadsheet scheduling with a working PCP routine: demand consolidation, capacity checks against real constraints, firm-horizon freezing, and a documented rule for how changes to the plan get approved.
Tiered meetings with fixed agendas and time limits — shift, area, plant. Each level escalates only what it cannot resolve. The point is not more meetings; it is fewer, shorter, with decisions that stick.
A small set of indicators with defined formulas, named owners, stated data sources and a fixed refresh cadence. If a number cannot be traced back to how it was collected, it does not go on the board.
Most plants have no written definition of what a supervisor should do hourly. We build it, then coach it on the floor until it holds without us.
Hour-by-hour boards, andon rules, downtime taxonomy. Deviation becomes visible within the hour instead of at month-end close.
A weekly pack your HQ can actually read, with the same definitions every week and commentary on variance — not a slide deck rebuilt from scratch each month.
We spend time on the floor, not in the meeting room. We map how the plan is made, how deviation is detected, who decides what, and where information dies between shifts. You receive a prioritized findings list at no cost.
We define the meeting tiers, the indicator set, the escalation rules and the reporting cadence — sized to your plant, not copied from a template.
We run the first cycles ourselves alongside your supervisors, then hand the facilitation over progressively. This is the phase most consultancies skip, and it is the reason most systems collapse.
We check that the routine survives without us present: are the boards current, is escalation happening, does the HQ pack still reconcile. Then we document and leave.
Yes. We work in English and Portuguese, and a standing weekly written pack plus a call in your time zone is part of most engagements. We report on the same definitions every week so trends stay comparable.
Yes, and it is common. A working daily management system can run on paper boards and a disciplined routine. We would rather build the routine first and let it define your system requirements than have software impose a process nobody follows.
It varies with plant size and how much management structure already exists. What we commit to is a checkpoint where we verify the routine runs with us absent — if it does not, we have not finished.
No. We build the system your existing management runs. If capability gaps appear during the diagnostic we will tell you plainly, but staffing decisions are yours.
Yes. On-site presence is the core of how we work, and travel is planned into the engagement.
Tell us about your operation in Brazil. We reply within one business day — no cost, no commitment.