I study why plants produce less than they should.

The patterns are everywhere. Schedules that break when the floor meets the cookers. Capital cases built on the wrong hour of the wrong shift. Reported numbers that disagree with the lines. Capacity hiding inside the seams between systems.

This journal is a working notebook. Each entry records a pattern observed on the floor, a mechanism worth naming, or a decision rule worth testing. Where it earns it, an entry also names the bar: what the well-run version of the same system looks like, in numbers you can score your own floor against. The entries are organized around the four decisions that move a plant: labor, automation, scheduling, and sourcing. The method behind them ties the four together.

I build digital twins of manufacturing facilities. I model reality before money gets spent. The tools find capacity that executives didn't know existed and build the business case to capture it.

Each decision looks self-contained on paper. Sourcing taken whole: materials, packaging, suppliers, specs. On the floor they interact, and the interactions are where the savings leak. A labor plan is a scheduling bet; an automation case is a sourcing assumption. Most entries trace one of those interactions to its mechanism, then read it through a lens of throughput, reliability, and leverage.

The observations here come from protein plants, bakeries, beverage lines, frozen food facilities, and dairy operations. The patterns repeat across all of them. The specifics change. The physics don't.

The closer you are to the system, the more obvious the constraints become.

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