Planning a large product portfolio transfer from external to internal production — with zero service disruption.

The client had built much of its portfolio around an external manufacturing partner. Over time, the arrangement had grown costly, slow to adapt, and increasingly fragile as volumes and complexity rose. The decision to bring production back in-house was straightforward; doing it without disrupting customers was not.

We were asked to build the transfer plan — covering volume planning, production scheduling, SKU sequencing, and supply continuity — so the internal team could execute with confidence.

The constraint that shaped everything

From day one, the brief was clear: no missed orders, no quality compromises, no surprise communications to customers. Every decision was tested against that constraint before anything else.

That single principle changed how the programme was sequenced. Instead of optimising for the fastest transfer, we optimised for the most resilient one — building safety stock ahead of each line move, running parallel production where it mattered, and accepting short periods of dual cost to protect service.

What we did

We rebuilt the transfer plan around supply continuity rather than line readiness. We mapped each SKU against demand variability, shelf life, and qualification lead time, and used that to set the order in which products moved.

We modelled production capacity and volume ramp across the transfer window — factoring in batch sizes, changeover times, and the staggered qualification of internal lines — to ensure the plan was executable day by day.

We designed a weekly planning cadence with the executive sponsor, the external partner, and the receiving site, so that forecasts were updated against actual progress and decisions were made by the people accountable for them.

The outcome

The full portfolio moved across to internal production on schedule. No customer order was missed during the transfer window. Quality performance on the internal lines met or exceeded the historical baseline within the first quarter of steady-state production.

Beyond the numbers, the organisation came out of the programme with a detailed planning methodology, a sequenced SKU transfer schedule, and a capacity model it has since reused for subsequent moves.