Operational Excellence Advisory
Advantage Operational Excellence helps small to medium businesses turn operational potential into measurable, sustained results: through Lean, Six Sigma and structured change management, applied by expert knowledge gained from professional training, as well as more than 20 years of implementation and advisory experience.
Thirty Years of Hands On Leadership
Thirty years of hands on leadership: from laboratory bench to lean implementation to production manager to Chief Operations Officer: condensed into a practical, evidence-based approach to improve your KPIs sustainably. No off the shelf, copy and paste frameworks bolted onto your business. Just disciplined diagnosis, in depth data analysis, root cause identification, and practical implementation, for results you can measure, and achieve, consistently.
What We Do
Who We Work With
Small to medium businesses in the private sector, with particular depth in FMCG manufacturing, agriprocessing and pharmaceuticals, though the approach applies throughout any manufacturing, financial and services environment.
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Credentials
Advantage Operational Excellence was founded by Collin Manickum, a manufacturing operations executive and operational excellence specialist with three decades of experience spanning chemical processing, FMCG manufacturing, batch processing manufacturing, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, most recently as Chief Operations Officer of a South African pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Collin's career has been built on a simple philosophy: operational excellence is only successful if it is lived by leadership and management, and embraced by employees. He has spent thirty years testing that premise: as a development chemist, laboratory manager, shift manager, production manager, operational excellence practitioner with a focus on lean and change management (from site to multi-site pan-African responsibility), and ultimately as an operations executive accountable for the full P&L of a manufacturing operation.
That experience is grounded in rigorous, structured training and skills in Operational Excellence. Collin holds an MBA (Cum Laude) from Stellenbosch Business School, with a dissertation examining the real world impact of operational excellence initiatives on KPIs - a realistic, data driven look at what actually moves the needle in a change programme, and what doesn't. It's this evidence first mindset, rather than a fixed methodology, that Advantage Operational Excellence brings to every engagement.
Philosophy
Every business's issues are different; the starting point is understanding yours, not applying a template.
Change programmes fail when they don't survive the person who led them leaving; the approach here is built around embedding capability, not dependency.
Recommendations are grounded in measurable evidence and root cause analysis, not opinions.
Formal, clear, evidence based communication suited to executive and board audiences explained simply and coherently - no jargon for its own sake.
The human factor is built into every change programme, to ensure buy in at all organisational levels, not just among sponsors.
AI tools are used, where useful, to speed up diagnostics, data analysis and reporting, so improvement programmes move faster. Judgement, workforce engagement and change management discipline still lead the outcome.
Advantage Operational Excellence currently operates as a focused, principal led practice: direct access to Collin on every engagement, with an associate model planned. This keeps engagements accountable, personal, and free of the layered overhead of larger operations excellence practitioners.
Services
Structured, evidence based improvement in the metrics that matter (efficiency, output, quality, cost, safety and delivery) using Lean, Six Sigma, and change management disciplines.
For operations that are underperforming, Advantage provides stabilisation and structural improvement, not just a report.
Board and executive level counsel, and hands on capability transfer for teams building their own improvement muscle.
As the practice grows toward a small associate team, larger and multi site engagements will be supported without losing this level of personal accountability.
Case Studies / Results
Anonymised engagement summaries reflecting work carried out during Collin's executive and operational career, presented as sector based case studies, not as named consulting clients.
A water intensive raw material preparation process was driving high water consumption and cost.
Trialled and implemented a redesigned process (switching from an immersion to a sprinkling based method), validated through structured testing before full rollout.
Minimum saving of R2m/year. Recognised as a best practice benchmark and rolled out to other sites.
Inconsistent water usage across process areas, with no differentiated control limits to flag deviation early.
Statistical analysis of usage data across multiple process areas to establish area specific control limits, enabling faster detection and correction of deviations.
Sustained cost saving of approximately R10 million per year.
High electricity costs driven by peak period usage of major equipment.
Applied energy modulation techniques to shift high consumption equipment usage to off peak periods, alongside steam and coal usage optimisation.
Reduced electricity, steam and coal costs.
Downtime and inconsistency in a secondary production area was eroding primary production output, resulting in increased cost and production delays.
Led a cross functional team to model and optimise secondary production recipes and process parameters.
Measurable reduction in downtime, with improvement in primary production output and associated production costs.
Long truck turnaround times for product loading was resulting in reduced product sales.
Led a cross functional team using Six Sigma technqiues to analyse data to identify and mitigate factors contributing to long truck turnaround times.
Truck turnaround times halved, resulting in increased product sales.
Batch failure rates were undermining production targets and adding significant cost within a pharmaceutical manufacturing environment.
Drove structured root cause analysis across the manufacturing process, strengthening in process controls, deviation management and right first time discipline.
Batch failure rate, materially improving right first time production reliability.
Constrained manufacturing capacity limited the ability to meet growing demand for products.
Led operational and capacity improvements across the manufacturing value chain, addressing outdated technology, bottlenecks in production planning, equipment utilisation and process throughput.
Production output tripled, substantially expanding manufacturing capacity to meet demand.
Low maintenance work order completion rates were contributing to equipment reliability risk and downtime exposure, ultimately impacting production targets.
Restructured maintenance department. Implemented structured maintenance planning and execution discipline, including improved work order prioritisation, scheduling and accountability.
Maintenance work order completion rate.
Employee engagement levels within the operation were below target, affecting productivity, morale, retention and plant performance.
Led a structured change management programme for employee engagement, including leadership and management visibility, communication improvements and targeted action planning against survey feedback.
Employee engagement index.
Research Note
Collin's MBA research (Stellenbosch Business School, Cum Laude) analysed the real world impact of an Operational Excellence programme on performance indicators over several years, testing, rather than assuming, whether the programme had worked, and examining which stages of the change process were most associated with sustained results. It's rare, evidence based grounding for a discipline too often driven by assumption, which directly informs how engagements at Advantage Operational Excellence are designed for long term sustainability rather than a short term improvement.
Blog
Featured
Most organisations can point to a change or improvement programme that delivered results on launch day and quietly faded within eighteen months. The uncomfortable truth, backed by structured research into one such programme, is that even well resourced initiatives often only partially succeed when measured rigorously against a full set of performance indicators; not just the ones chosen to showcase success.
Research conducted by Collin for an MBA dissertation at Stellenbosch Business School examined a major Operational Excellence initiative against shopfloor level KPIs, tracking which measures moved, which didn't, and, using Kotter's eight-step change model, which stages of the change process most influenced whether gains were sustained. The findings were candid: real, statistically significant improvement was achieved in a meaningful share of indicators, but sustainability required more than technical implementation: it required specific attention to short term wins being visibly recognised, and change being actively embedded as part of the change management strategy, rather than assumed to hold on its own.
The practical implication for manufacturers: measure broadly, not just the metrics chosen to prove success; and treat the "make it stick" phase of a change programme as a discipline in its own right, not an afterthought once the technical work is done.
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Advantage Operational Excellence works with manufacturers across South Africa and internationally.