70-Year Operation: 28% Cost Down, Zero Downtime
Re-engineered a 70-year operation, reducing costs by 28% while maintaining zero downtime.
Digital Transformation
Financial Advisory
Strategic Planning
Category
Halden Industries
Client
Tech startup
Date
March 20, 2026
The Challenge
Where the business was.
Halden Industries, a 1,200-person precision metals manufacturer, was losing margin to lower-cost regional competitors and could not give customers real-time order status. ERP data lived in three disconnected systems, the shop floor ran on paper travelers, and a prior $4M MES implementation had been quietly shelved after 18 months. Leadership was skeptical of another transformation program but knew that without one, the business would commodity-price itself out of its top accounts within three years.
The Solution
What VENTROUX did.
VENTROUX began with a 4-week operating-model diagnostic, mapping every workflow from quote to cash and quantifying margin leakage at each handoff. The diagnostic identified $14M of annual margin recovery — 70% of which required only three integrated systems and disciplined process change, not the full digital factory the prior vendor had pitched. We designed a phased 18-month program: unified ERP+CRM data layer first, then shop-floor IoT for the four highest-leakage cells, then predictive maintenance. We selected vendors, ran the program office, and led change management with the union — including a profit-share program tied to the savings.
