Kesselmann Werkzeugbau
Family-owned tooling and precision components group, 14 plants
- Engagement
- 26 weeks
- Office
- Munich
- Lead partner
- Katharina Brandt
The challenge
Kesselmann's margin had thinned across fourteen plants with no single cause: a product range grown by acquisition, list prices last revisited in a cheaper decade, and cost-to-serve that treated every order alike.
What we did
The team built a cost-to-serve model down to the engineering hours the ERP hid, rebuilt segments on that truth, and moved prices with a story per segment. In parallel, plant teams worked changeover and the maintenance backlog on the three lines that set group capacity.
Every pricing move shipped with an objection script the sales team wrote themselves; every operational fix carried an owner and a weekly number.
The outcome
Gross margin rose 210 basis points across the group within four quarters. On-time delivery rose from 71 to 94 percent, and the sales team kept two large accounts the old model would have repriced out the door.
Gross margin +210 bps
On-time delivery +23%
Cost of rework −1.7 % of COGS
Bars are scaled per metric against its own maximum. Direction of improvement: Gross margin, On-time delivery, Cost of rework — see each metric.
| Metric | Before | After | Change | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross margin | 31.2 bps gain | 33.3 bps gain | +210 bps | Higher is better |
| On-time delivery | 71 % | 94 % | +23% | Higher is better |
| Cost of rework | 3.8 % of COGS | 2.1 % of COGS | −1.7 % of COGS | Lower is better |
Expertise behind this program
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