A clear investment thesis. An operating reality that told a different story.
When a private equity fund acquired a fast-growing European medtech company, the value creation plan was straightforward: accelerate revenue, improve margins, free up cash. The operating numbers inside the business were far less encouraging.
On-time delivery hovered at 65 percent against a three-day customer promise. Finished goods covered more than 260 days of demand — over three times the industry benchmark. More than a third of finished goods inventory was not moving at all. Meanwhile, revenue grew at 11 percent per year and inventory at 20 percent, compounding the structural problem with each passing quarter.
The supply chain was not just underperforming. It was actively working against the deal thesis. The fund asked Qwinn Business Partners one direct question: can this supply chain support the investment case, or not?
Solid factories. Broken system.
Qwinn’s assessment covered planning, sourcing, manufacturing and order fulfilment across Europe and the US. Plant visits, data reviews and structured interviews with leaders in operations, sales, finance and IT formed the evidence base.
Manufacturing performance was not the core problem. Unit costs were competitive. The issue was systemic: no end-to-end planning discipline, no mature S&OP process, and regions operating on spreadsheets and informal rules. Europe and the US reported different numbers on the same business. Once an order slipped, recovery was slow. Stock kept growing faster than demand.
Benchmarked against industry peers, the company scored well on cost. On service and inventory, it sat in the bottom quartile. The message to the CEO and Board was unambiguous: without structural change, this supply chain would continue blocking growth, burning cash and putting the investment case at risk.
Scenario modelling sharpened the stakes. Without intervention, finished goods inventory would more than double within two years. With a structured roadmap, the company could roughly double revenue in the same period while keeping inventory below today’s level — avoiding over 60 percent of the stock growth that the “do nothing” path would have produced.
Three building blocks. One coherent direction.
Qwinn and the leadership team defined hard mid-term targets tied directly to revenue, margin and cash: lift OTIF from the mid-60s to above 90 percent; reduce finished goods days-on-hand from 260+ to approximately 90 days; support strong revenue growth while keeping absolute inventory broadly flat. Three structural changes were agreed to get there.
Planning as a discipline, not a spreadsheet.
Structural accountability from day one
Moving from fragmented regional teams to a single global supply chain organisation gave the CEO and the fund something they had not had before: one clear person who owned the full order-to-delivery chain. Qwinn took line responsibility inside the executive committee, with a budget, a governance role and regular Board sessions on stock, cash and risk. Design alone does not change a supply chain. Ownership does.
A 13-week execution cycle that stuck
The team built a simple, repeatable Sales and Operations Execution rhythm on a short rolling horizon. Country and regional demand reviews each week. A master schedule review testing demand against capacity and key materials. Then a global S&OE decision meeting where cross-regional conflicts and inventory choices were resolved with one set of numbers. The aim was not a textbook S&OP built over years. The aim was disciplined collaboration — one calendar, one data pack, one set of escalation rules.
Service up. Inventory down. Decision-making transformed.
By the end of the first full year, the numbers and the organisational mood had both shifted in a visible direction.
Shipping performance, corrected for a major product recall, improved from the mid-60s to approximately 80 percent — a roughly 20 percent relative gain within the customer promise window. The three-year roadmap targets 90 percent, which would place the company above the industry mean for comparable medtech players. Customers noticed. So did the commercial teams, who spent meaningfully less time explaining delays.
Finished goods days-on-hand fell from over 260 to approximately 240. A measured first step, but achieved while service levels were simultaneously improving — a combination that supply chain teams rarely accomplish at the same time. The long-range scenario showed the full consequence: without these changes, inventory would have exceeded twice its current level within two years. With the roadmap, the company can roughly double revenue over the same period while keeping inventory slightly below today’s level.
Decision quality improved with equal consequence. Sales, finance, manufacturing and supply chain aligned on the same numbers in the same meeting. Escalations to the CEO arrived with clear scenarios showing the service, stock and cash impact of each option. Board discussions on supply chain shifted from late orders and emergency air freight to service targets, stock scenarios and long-term capacity needs.
“For the first time, I feel I understand our stock.”
— Board Member, PE-backed medtech firm
Three principles that travel across portfolio companies
Siloed workstreams on inventory reduction and service improvement cancel each other out. Design every change so it shows its impact on all three simultaneously. That is how investment committees assess the business — and how supply chain teams should think about it too.
A slide deck is not a supply chain. Durable change requires a named owner, a budget and a seat at the executive table — whether interim or permanent. Design without line accountability produces good presentations and no results.
The first visible moves were modest: a weekly backorder review, a global allocation rule set, a basic S&OE cycle, one clear owner. Simple enough to test quickly, credible enough to build confidence for the larger structural changes — systems, contracts, network design — that followed.
