3.5 Weeks Past the Deadline: How a Special-Purpose Machinery Manufacturer Mastered Penalty-Free Deliveries

Lean · 3 min read · 26.08.2026

Client

A machine-building company manufacturing custom special-purpose machines — welding, testing and assembly equipment for industrial customers. 85 employees, one shift, supplemented by on-site assembly call-outs at customer facilities. There is no series production here: part of the engineering is repeated, the rest is custom-built to order.

The company is presented anonymously — this is a composite study compiled from several projects we have delivered in the special-purpose machinery segment. The project was initiated by the operations director after two orders where late-delivery penalties exceeded the margin of the entire order.

Challenge

Machines were delivered on average 3.5 weeks after the contractual deadline. Everyone on the shop floor knew the causes, but no one had them quantified: assemblers spent an estimated quarter of their working time searching for parts on shelves and waiting for drawings. The warehouses were full — yet exactly the components that assembly needed at that moment were missing.

The consequences kept escalating. A month before shipment, night shifts were budgeted in and management fought slippage by shuffling people between orders. Penalties were a routine line item in cost calculations. Customers kept ordering, but they began asking for longer buffer lead times in quotations — and the chance of winning new orders kept falling.

Approach

1. Measuring flow and losses. For one week we measured where time was going in assembly. The shop-floor estimate was confirmed: searching for parts and waiting for documentation accounted for just under 25% of working time. For the first time we also had the actual durations of assembly blocks, which until then had been planned “by eye”.
2. Kitting parts per machine. Instead of bulk shelving, the warehouse now assembles complete kits — one pallet, one machine, one order. An empty spot on the kitting rack immediately shows what is missing. Assembly stopped supplying itself.
3. 5S in the assembly hall. Every tool has a fixed location, the end-of-shift status is marked, and the check takes the foreman five minutes. Housekeeping turned into visual management: a delay becomes visible the same day, not at shipment.
4. Takt-paced assembly with checkpoints. We broke the key orders down into blocks with an indicative takt time and defined checkpoints. A block only starts with a complete kit of parts and released documentation — engineering issues drawings ahead of time, so the assembler never waits for them.
5. Daily board meeting. Ten minutes in the morning, three questions: where are we behind, what is missing, and who will fix it today. The foremen now run the meetings themselves — the standard has stuck even after the external consultant left.

Results

The changes were rolled out over six months, with no investment in the facility or new technology. The numbers after consolidation:

• Average machine delivery delay dropped from 3.5 weeks to less than 1 week.
• Searching for parts and waiting for documentation took 70% less time than at the initial measurement.
• Late-delivery penalties: €0 in two consecutive quarters.

No new people, space, or faster machines were added. The time freed up from searching for parts was redirected into assembly itself. Night shifts before shipment disappeared, and for the first time in years the assemblers know what they will be working on tomorrow morning. The foremen maintain the standards, and kitting is part of production planning, not of an external project.

The same logic works across the entire machinery segment: measure where time and money are leaking away, and fix the cause, not the consequence. How we apply it in manufacturing cost reduction is described on the service page.

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