SMEDing Thanksgiving
1 minute read · 23rd November 2023
Optimize your Thanksgiving using the SMED method.
Prior to Chartwell, a graduate in Aeronautical Engineering, he started his career as an engineer in the Nuclear Power industry. Andy led the turnaround as owner and CEO of a defence and aerospace manufacturing business. Andy leads many of Chartwell’s speciality chemical client projects and during the COVID-19 pandemic led the operations team that delivered a 100 fold increase in production of PCR medical diagnostic assays and equipment.
Andy Redfern
Partner
With over 28 years’ experience as a consultant to top multinational businesses, I have led many hundreds of successful projects delivering results in manufacturing and operations. I lead many of Chartwell’s speciality chemical client projects and specialize in highly technical and complex processes.
“For me, one of the things I enjoy most about a project is the first few days with a new client. The intensity of study and understanding hidden potential is exhilarating for me and always enlightening for the client.”
University of Cambridge, Aeronautical Engineering
Prior to Chartwell, a graduate in Aeronautical Engineering, I started my career as an engineer in the Nuclear Power industry. I led the turnaround as owner and CEO of a defence and aerospace manufacturing business. While many of the projects I lead at Chartwell are with specialty chemical clients, during the COVID-19 pandemic I led the operations team that delivered a 100-fold increase in production of PCR medical diagnostic assays and equipment.
Overall, my career has been dedicated to helping improve the performance and profitability of vital manufacturing, engineering and support services businesses. I have worked both as a consultant and through direct operational leadership. The common theme has always been to drive a step change in performance with lasting sustainable results.
The work our team contributed during the COVID-19 pandemic is my greatest achievement so far. Helping to increase output of critical PCR testing kits to meet the ever-increasing global demand was not only professionally fulfilling, but also personally. We know the impact of our work is far greater than a single site or organization, but never was this point as true as when it came to this project.
I am firstly an engineer and when I’m not working on client projects I can be found tinkering in my workshop and enjoying my classic car collection.
He loves working in high-urgency-high-value situations, where a large improvement is needed in a short time.
For me, the best part of the job is helping client teams to deliver great results that they never thought would be possible, getting people excited about making the graph go up, and shifting their mindset to believe that further improvement is always possible.
Cornell University, Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, with a side of Astronomy.
My entire career has been focused on helping clients continually improve, regardless of organization size or industry. I fundamentally believe that improving productivity is the key ingredient that fuels innovation and improves the quality of life for everyone.
As a Partner at Chartwell, my mission is to help create new partners that will fuel our company’s growth and continue to help our clients make long-lasting improvements long into the future. I’m also continuously seeking to improve our core methodologies, to help our project teams and clients to unlock great results even faster.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we made the decision to re-deploy all of Chartwell’s resources into pandemic fighting industries. This required us to seek out an entirely new set of clients and adapt our methodologies to these sectors. Chartwell went on to help to increase the output of COVID-19 testing kits, healthcare supplements, the COVID-19 vaccine and other sterile injectable drugs, the major COVID-19 therapeutics, complex API and biologics production, and drug substance packaging.
The results were astonishing – the teams were able to get at least +20-50% more output everywhere we ran projects, and in many cases were able to get 2x or 3x capacity increases. This work led us to add pharma/API as a cornerstone of Chartwell’s core purpose: to help increase the global supply of lifesaving and life extending drugs.
Fast forward to today, and our research team is constantly looking for drug shortages and pharma capacity shortages, so that we can reach out and offer to help.
There is always much more opportunity to improve than what people think. When site teams are asking for help and keen to improve, this is when we will find the 20-50% opportunity. And when the site teams resist help from outsiders or believe everything is already optimized, this is when we will find the opportunity to improve 2x or 3x or more.
I enjoy spending time with family, traveling, reading, training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and lifting heavy things.
Miriam Hall
Partner
As a leader in rapid profit improvement, I have extensive experience leading step-change operational improvements in the chemicals, pharmaceutical and food and beverage sectors. I help leaders realize the full potential of their teams and assets with a transformational effect on their business’s EBITDA.
I love helping teams to overcome persistent problems- technical or organizational – that people had often given up on solving. I get a real buzz from seeing how effective a team can become once they start believing in step-change improvement.
Oxford University, Master’s in Physics and Philosophy.
University Gibbs Prize 2012 for obtaining top ranking within class.
Moberly Scholar, St Hilda’s College Oxford.
Born and raised in the North of England, I knew I wanted to make an impact from an early age. The idea of finding out at a fundamental level what’s going on in the world was so exciting to me and was the driver of studying physics and philosophy. While studying at Oxford, I started my first business – Awesome Storage – to provide a solution to the exhausting task of moving in and out of university in such a short amount of time. This taste of entrepreneurship enforced my desire to make a tangible and immediate impact. From there I started my own consulting company doing just that.
The experience I gained from consultant work at my company and others led me to become Chartwell’s first internally promoted Partner. As part of the day-to-day, I find satisfaction in coaching and leading my teams to pursue their own career and personal goals. This includes leading our internal efforts on Corporate Social Governance (CSR).
On a personal note, I’m incredibly passionate about learning about other cultures and languages. I’ve had the great fortune of living in several countries and thoroughly enjoy helping clients make step-change improvements around the world.
My greatest achievement to date at Chartwell is the work done at a plastics manufacturer. Not only were we able to save a manufacturing site from closing, but we saved 1,000 tonnes of plastic waste as part of the project. While the environmental impact was incredible, the personal and professional growth I saw from my clients’ team is hard to put into words. I loved every moment of this project and to see the positive impact I made in that organization is bar none.
After a really engaging update of progress on a project at one of a client’s sites that wasn’t performing that well, I took him to one side and asked him, ‘we’ve got great results here, where else in your network could do with these kind of results?’. He responded, ‘all the other plants are performing well against benchmarks, I don’t think we need any external help.’ I smiled, because the one piece of advice I’d give to any operational leader is that your worst performing plants are probably the least impactful place to involve external help.
There are plenty of people in your organization who know how to make a dysfunctional process functional or to give a scattergun team that is firefighting structure. We can help with that too – but you’ll get the biggest return, financially and in your team, from engaging with razor-sharp world experts in improving in the places where you’d love to be able to improve, but no-one – including you – thinks it can be done because that team is already the best.
I’m lucky in that my work also gives me the opportunity to indulge two of my main extra-curricular passions – discovering new cultures and learning new languages. I’m grateful for the way I’ve been able to immerse myself in different cultures and to understand how their languages’ quirks reflect or have caused the charming idiosyncrasies of each. Off the production line, I love playing board games with friends, building and painting miniatures and appreciating great theatre.
Jonathan Willis
Partner
With over 50 improvement projects in the UK, Europe and the USA, I have vast industry experience in pharmaceuticals, chemicals and industrial products. I help manufacturers develop processes and roll-out improvements across their sites around the world.
I believe that everyone wants to do a good job, and that many people can feel frustrated by existing systems and processes. I love challenging and changing these systems to help people do the right thing more easily, and to build their capacity to identify and execute future changes for themselves.
University of Cambridge, Master of Engineering in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering.
Before I began my Engineering studies, the world of construction captivated me. Delivering complex and ambitious solutions to challenges requires an astounding level of precision in planning and execution. The need for these skills first struck me when visiting the Millau Viaduct in France in the early 2000s – aligning a 342m bridge deck with a pylon 270m in the air to within millimetres is quite something! This, along with my ability to lead others through complex and complicated systems, has helped me be successful throughout my career.
I take great satisfaction knowing that the work we do with our clients has a positive, and often far-reaching impact on the communities they serve. Working with Pharmaceutical companies, both during the Covid Pandemic and in more normal times, is a great example of how our work can bring a real change in the world – our improvements translate into more life-saving drugs being available to patients around the world.
On a personal note, I am excited to see how we can engage with organisations to help combat climate change. Improving how we use our energy in manufacturing is vital for moving to a more sustainable future, and to ensure that my daughter’s generation has better opportunities and prospects than we do.
My greatest achievements to date at Chartwell are found in the large body of work that we have done at multiple sites for a large pharmaceutical manufacturer. In just one of these projects, we helped increase their output of a critical drug by over 200%, meaning they were able to give 45,000 patients an extra 23 years of life.
Having worked and led over 50 improvement projects, there are two key things that massively increase the probability of successfully delivering change:
One perk of my job is the opportunity to travel to all sorts of places, especially ones that aren’t on the normal tourist routes. This gives me a great opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds and to explore local cultures and foods.
Outside of work, I like to extend this exploration into the early hours of the morning. Seeing a place at sunrise gives an opportunity to experience places in a whole new way. It is quite something to be stood on the Brooklyn Bridge in complete isolation, or to see the nights purple hue recede and reveal the vistas of a National Park.
Since joining Chartwell in 2017, he has had the opportunity to work in a wide range of industries, resolving multiple companies biggest operational challenges and delivering transformational results which have a tangible impact on business performance.
Andrew Smith
Associate Partner
I enjoy working on teams largest challenges and achieving results of magnitudes which previously were thought to be unattainable.
Masters in Biochemical Engineering, University of Bath 2014
Since I began my engineering studies, I knew I wanted to use my technical acumen to solve companies’ largest problems. Having a solid grounding in operations management from my prior job within industry, I transitioned into consulting to ensure that not only was I working on the largest problems, but also by extension, working on the things that would have the greatest impact both on companies and their end consumers.
After running dozens of transformational improvement projects across multiple different industries, I take the most satisfaction from knowing that the work we do with our clients has a profound impact on their business and the lives of the customers they serve.
Interesting pieces of analysis of facts and data that your organization has is just that … interesting. What really matters is actionable insight. How do we go about improvement? What’s the masterplan and timeline? How much improvement are we going to get and by when? How do we convert operations improvement to real financial value? All of these questions I answer by taking complex concepts and concisely portraying them in an understandable manner without over-simplifying and missing key details. This makes the right course of action as clear as possible to all stakeholders.
Leading teams of consultants to rapidly increase the capacity of processes producing life-saving drugs during the Covid-19 pandemic. This included increasing the capacity of vaccine production by 110 million doses per year in a 5-month period.
Having done both, I can say running a factory and improving a factory are two different things. Input from the folks running the process is essential to driving improvement, but relying on them to be the sole drivers of improvement is unlikely to yield a step-change in performance in the short-term.
Although I peaked during college, I still play squash to keep myself active. I also enjoy exploring the USA as the new country which I now call home.
Rob Crawford
Associate Partner
If my successes and failures throughout my career so far have taught me anything, it is the criticality of not overlooking the people-centric part of manufacturing. The technical aspects of identifying changes to implement are usually pretty straightforward compared to the challenge of actually getting people to do things differently, day-in and day-out.
Driving those behavioural and cultural changes is a great challenge – refining my approach to this central problem has been my greatest learning over the past 8 years, and still continues every day.
My favourite thing about working at Chartwell is continuously learning. Whatever grade you are at or project you are staffed on, there are always opportunities to learn and great people to learn from – internally and on the client side.
A close second would be the satisfaction of making real, measurable change happen.
Bachelor’s Degree in Natural Sciences and Master’s Degree in Materials Science from Cambridge University, UK
I spent my childhood moving between different countries every 2-3 years. Perhaps this is where my love of seeing new places and meeting new people comes from.
At university, I quickly moved away from my original plan to study Physics and towards the more tangible and directly-applicable study of Materials Science. The opportunity to use my science degree to solve interesting, urgent, important problems in a manufacturing setting and to get paid to travel the world and meet interesting people was too good to pass up, and I was delighted to join Chartwell after finishing my Master’s degree in 2015.
Being one of Chartwell’s first 10 employees, I have been able to help grow and shape the business in a wide range of areas – from recruitment to training and new product development. I was also one of three Chartwell team members to set up our US office in Boston in 2017, where I have now returned to live.
During my time at Chartwell, I’ve had the opportunity to work across a wide range of industries and meet wonderful people around the world – expert Cheese makers in Wisconsin, textile weavers in Georgia, Foam makers in Poland, Super Yacht painters in Mallorca and Barcelona, and many experts in biomedical sciences in Pharmaceutical plants across Europe and the US. Being able to build relationships with interesting people from every level of our clients’ organizations has been a great source of joy for me.
The one FIVE most important insights I try to pass along to clients, colleagues, and anyone else who will listen:
My greatest achievement at Chartwell was undoubtedly the work I did to help establish our US office. The ongoing impact from our work to hire, train and support that original group of excellent team members is far greater than anything I could hope to achieve individually – and I’m very proud of the impact of my individual work.
Outside of work I’m a keen football player, scuba diver, nature photographer, traveller, beer brewer, hiker, reader, and cook. Any time I can be outdoors, underwater or eating something extraordinary is time well spent for me.
1 minute read · 23rd November 2023
Optimize your Thanksgiving using the SMED method.