ABOUT CLOVER CONSULTING
At Clover Consulting, we leverage best-in-class, multinational corporate experience to empower small businesses in the Cotswolds and Oxfordshire, driving efficiency, quality improvement, and operational excellence.
We believe that continuous improvement, LEAN principles, and operational excellence are accessible to all, enabling even the smallest workshops to operate efficiently and focus on customer needs. With our scientific approach and problem-solving expertise, we simplify complex challenges and build streamlined systems that prevent a reoccurrence for sustainable success.
We are passionate about Sustainability – looking at energy-saving opportunities as well as driving machine efficiency and productivity improvements. We believe that every step we take to make manufacturing more efficient, reduce material wastage and improve yield is important to protect our environment.
Our origin story:
A question I’ve got multiple times is why “Clover Consulting”? On the day I took the decision to start my own business and made the first steps, coming home from school my son looked at our front garden and spotted a 4-leaf clover right at the front door. Three days later, when I finally took the decision on the name he popped in with a 5-leaf clover.
I’M ESTHER UDVARNAGYI
A PASSIONATE PROBLEM-SOLVER
I spent most of my career managing smaller or larger teams and different manufacturing units and engineering teams. This puts me in a great position to fully understand and address your problems with empathy and experience. Over the years I learned to talk about business strategy to the operative team, understand the root causes behind emotions and frustration, and see and communicate priorities through risk and potential cost impact. I never apply patches but solve problems and build simple, sustainable systems and work processes.
I started my career as a process engineer at Procter & Gamble in 2007 and since then, there has been no day in my life when I did not use process improvement, standardization or advanced problem-solving techniques. Yes, even when I was at home with my newborn son I collected data about his sleeping pattern (if any) to optimize our daily routine.
I have a true passion for data: gathering the right information, analysing and finding the relevant piece to solve a problem, building models to predict the future and finding the best structure to support business goals. And I did it for long years, in smaller or bigger teams – but mostly at large multinational companies. I learnt different approaches, faced various challenges and solved a diverse range of problems. I worked in the fast-paced FMCG sector, in food manufacturing, in the labour-heavy textile industry and lastly in the high-tech medical device sector producing biosensors. I am a trained GMP Quality auditor and had a chance to gain knowledge in financial auditing and internal control (stewardship).
Although my main passion and focus were on manufacturing, I also led an Engineering team and worked on multiple supply chain projects (planning optimizations, WH stock control, material supply, receiving and disposal processes). Quality and Safety were always an integral part of my job, as well as people management: not only shift pattern and resource planning but recruitment and onboarding, talent management, succession planning and most importantly communication and engagement.
I recently completed the IBM Skills Academy: Data Science training program and earn a professional certificate. It was interesting to know stats and maths from a new perspective. Although I learned planning and executing experiments and evaluating the results in a scientific or R&D environment, gathering, parsing, cleaning and analysing real live big data was new and exciting – not to mention the oportunities in machine learning and data visualisation.
OUR EXPERTISE
Support to develop and reiterate your Vision and Strategy
A clear Vision - Mission - Strategy is essential and must be translated to yearly goals and individual action plans: this is where a one day workshop can help. At the end of the day, the whole team will go back to their routine empowered by the clarity about the goals and expectations, energized and engaged to deliver a plan they developed as a team.
Sometimes the easily accessible metrics are not meaningful or even misleading. If your metrics are always in green but your business keeps seeing disruptions or inefficiencies, time to look at the KPIs. Depending on the skills of your team, a simple excel file can be a perfect tool to track your metrics, but a good PowerBi dashboard might bring the meetings to a new level.
Continuous supply chain crisis and increasing costs put a huge pressure on all business, and mapping your value stream - understanding the material and information flow, what adds value from the perspective of the customers (internal and external), the cost of the WIP and waiting times can help to make quick adjustments and design an ideal state (strategic goal) of your processes
Building up the capability to translate losses (downtime, wastage, human resource losses) into financial figures helps the leadership team at all levels to focus on the major problems and take decision on improvement projects.
Many companies (small and large ones) are suffering from headcount issues, however reviewing the actual jobs and differentiating entry to master levels could enable vertical start up of a new employee and improve retention and engagement for all.
There is a point at all manufacturers - not only at start-ups - when you want to scale up, or start up a new product line. When the originally simple processes become a complicated hassle, or you see an increased number of human error: it is time to review your systems and processes with growth and success in mind. Learn more about our Growth model.
Having improvement ideas is an amazing starting point, but delivering results is an art. Especially when you have a large bucket of ideas - hard to know where to start to maximize the impact.
LEAN management and Data-Centric Problem-Solving
It's easy to be lost in the different tools, but a well designed methodology can help you through the toughest investigation and helps to implement robust solutions. Data and observations versus experience and gossips help to redefine the problem statement, analysing all the possible causes and their effects brings in a scientific approach and results in a better understanding of the process/events. Finally, root cause analysis and standardization prevent reoccurrence.
When there is a huge variation across shifts or teams, the performance is unpredictable, you can see extended downtime a deep analysis on the work processes can reveal best practices, trigger excellent ideas in your team, visualise improvement opportunities. Working with multiples teams will result a consensus and an engaging standard.
At some point all manufacturers and packing operations face disruptive material challenges. Without an experienced engineer or CI manager, it is hard to organise data collection, run statistical analysis to understand the root cause to support the decision making
A good tracking tool can help you to follow and validate with minimum effort all the actions: from Break down analysis, Process improvement meetings, Quality/HSE audits or internal mini audits. It also builds accountability and transparency, minimises reoccurrence. The tool can be scalable and grow with your business.
Are you lucky to access large amount of data but you are lacking the skills to analyse and use them to improve? Or you have no/limited numeric data and thinking about designing a data-flow, or using unstructured/text data? Curious how machine learning can revolutionize your processes? We are here to help.
A working ideation system is an excellent tool to make small improvements in safety/quality and performance, but also improves employee engagement.
5S is the perfect system to start standardization and improve reliability and predictability - it builds a mindset. It dramatically improves the working environment of the employees and provides audit and visitor readiness at all times. Regular audits will sustain the results and make continuous the improvement.