05 Mar
If your locations operate like independent businesses, you’re paying for it, whether you see it or not.
Different location, different process. Sound familiar?
That’s not how it should be.
We recently worked with a VP at a $300M manufacturing company with seven different locations. Let’s call him Bob. His problem wasn’t performance, on paper, things were fine. His problem was that every plant and office operated its own way.
Same company. Seven different ways of doing things.
The sales team at one location followed a process that didn’t exist anywhere else. Onboarding looked completely different depending on which site you joined. The same role had different responsibilities based on who your manager was. And the same systems? Used completely differently at every site.
Bob was tired of it. Not because any single location was failing—but because the inconsistency made them ineffective as an organization.
Here’s what that actually costs you.
When every location operates its own way, a few things break down:
Executives can’t manage what they can’t see. If every location runs differently, there’s no apples-to-apples comparison. You can’t identify what’s working, what’s not, or where to focus. You’re managing seven businesses, not one.
Shared services become a joke. HR, finance, IT; they’re supposed to serve the whole organization. But when every location has different workflows, different expectations, and different ways of using the same tools, shared resources spend more time adapting than adding value.
Organization-wide change becomes a slog. Want to roll out a new system? A new policy? A new initiative? Good luck. Every location requires its own version, its own training, its own implementation. What should take weeks takes months, or never fully lands at all.
You can’t transfer people or knowledge. When processes vary by location, your best people aren’t portable. Tribal knowledge stays siloed. And when someone leaves, that location has to rebuild from scratch.
Bob was living all of this.
So we fixed it.
We didn’t pick one location’s way and force everyone else to adopt it. That’s a recipe for resistance.
Instead, we worked with each location to understand their current processes, what they did, why they did it, and what actually worked. Then we identified the best practices across all seven sites and built the standard from there.
The people doing the work helped shape the standard. That’s how you get buy-in.
What changed?
The company is now on track to save $7M from process improvement efforts. But the real win isn’t the cost savings, it’s what became possible once everyone was running on the same playbook.
Executives finally have visibility across the entire operation. Management meetings are about strategy, not firefighting location-specific issues. Shared services actually work. New initiatives roll out once, not seven times. And when someone moves from one location to another, they already know how things work.
Same company. Now actually operating like one.
How many versions of “how we do things” exist across your locations? That’s the size of your problem.