Consulting · Manufacturing · Mumbai
Revenue doubled. The white-collar team stayed at thirty.
The short version
Innofitt has been making workplace accessories since 1981 and supplies most of the names you would expect — Wipro, Godrej, TCS, State Bank of India, IIM Ahmedabad. Sunil and Anil Devnani wanted the business to run without them in it, so they could spend their time on where it was going rather than what it was doing today. We found a company with processes that existed on paper and no mechanism for knowing whether anyone followed them. Over three years we built objectives that cascaded from business goals, indicators and trackers for all35roles, and automated reporting behind each one. Revenue roughly doubled between 2021 and 2022 while the white-collar team stayed at30.
The processes existed. Nobody was watching them.
This is a more common situation than the alternative and a harder one to see. A business with no processes knows it has a problem. A business with processes that are quietly not being followed looks organised, right up until you ask for the evidence.
We interviewed every unique role and found the same pattern in each function. Processes had been set, sometimes years earlier, and there was no routine by which anyone checked adherence. So adherence drifted — not through negligence, but because nothing depended on it. And because each department had drifted in its own direction, the handoffs between them had become the friction points: work arriving in a shape the next team did not expect, and everybody reasonably certain they had done their bit correctly.
The company had also grown substantially since those processes were written, so some of what was needed did not exist in any form.
Inter-departmental friction is almost never a relationship problem. It is usually two teams following two versions of a process that used to match, with nobody positioned to notice they had come apart.
What we built
The management team’s stated ambition was autonomy: department heads who understood the business metrics well enough to run operations without escalation. That set the design. Indicators had to reach far enough down that a team leader could act on them without asking permission.
| 01 | Business goals defined with the management team, then the strategic initiatives each department would need to take on to reach them. |
| 02 | Buy-in built on those initiatives before anything was cascaded — department heads agreeing to the goal before receiving an objective attached to it. |
| 03 | OKRs for department heads, each traceable back to a strategic initiative rather than invented at department level. |
| 04 | Indicators for all 35 unique roles, with measurement criteria and rating levels defined for each — so a rating meant the same thing in two different departments. |
| 05 | Data trackers, input forms, automated reports and automated analysis behind every metric, so the number arrived without anyone assembling it by hand. |
| 06 | Every indicator explained to the person it applied to, in terms of what it would tell them about their own work. |
Item five is what makes the rest survivable. A tracker somebody has to compile manually every week is a tracker that stops being compiled in month three. Automating the collection is what turns a reporting system into a habit.
Then three years of making it stick
Designing this took months. We stayed for three years, and that is the part of the engagement worth explaining, because it is the part most performance systems never get.
| Adherence reviewed on a cadence, and corrected | Not a monthly report on compliance — a standing review of whether processes were being followed and trackers kept current, with the relevant team pushed to fix it wherever they had drifted. |
| Friction resolution during the transition | New measurement exposes disagreements that were previously invisible. Someone has to sit in the middle of those while teams work out the new handoffs. |
| Coaching managers on feedback | We sat in structured reviews and helped managers identify what to actually say — specific pointers, constructive framing, clear actions. A performance system in the hands of a manager who cannot give feedback is just a scoreboard. |
| Individual support where it was needed | The reviews surfaced people who were going to struggle against a clearer standard. We worked with them rather than letting the system quietly sort them out. |
A performance system does not fail because it was designed badly. It fails because after four months the trackers are stale, two departments have gone back to the old way, and one manager has decided the reviews are a formality. Every one of those is a person problem with a deadline, and none of them is solved by a better framework.
That last point is also why the engagement was three years rather than eight months. The design was not the hard part.
What it produced
| Measure | Figure | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ~2× | Roughly 100% growth between 2021 and 2022. Client-reported figure given to us during the engagement. |
| White-collar team size | 30 → 30 | Unchanged across the same period. This is the figure that makes the one above meaningful. |
| Revenue per white-collar employee | ~2× | The two figures above. Output per person in the office roughly doubled. |
| Roles instrumented | 35 | Every unique role, each with indicators, measurement criteria, rating levels, a tracker and automated reporting. Our own project records. |
| Engagement length | 38 months | September 2021 to October 2024, concluded on completion of scope. |
How to read this
The revenue figure is the client’s, not ours. We had no access to Innofitt’s accounts and did not audit anything. What we can state from our own records is the scope, the duration and the count of what was built. The doubling is what the management team told us during the engagement, and we are reporting it as that.
Only the white-collar team was flat. Production headcount is a different question and we are not claiming it was unchanged. The claim is specific: the office team that plans, sells, buys and administers did not grow while the business it supported roughly doubled.
A doubling has more than one cause. The market for workplace and ergonomic products moved sharply in this period as offices reopened and reconfigured, and Innofitt was well placed for it. A performance system does not create demand. What it can do is let a business absorb demand without adding overhead, and that is the part of this we would claim.
Adherence was reviewed and corrected, not published. Process adherence was reviewed on a set cadence throughout the engagement, and where it slipped the relevant team was pushed to course-correct. That was the core of the weekly work rather than an afterthought. What we do not have is a single baseline-to-endline compliance figure to put on this page, because those reviews were run to fix things rather than to produce a statistic.
Ending the engagement was the point
The brief was to build a business that ran without its owners in the middle of it. An engagement that satisfies that brief has to end, and in October 2024 this one did — not because a budget ran out or a relationship cooled, but because the scope was finished.
Two years on, the systems are still running. That is the only durability claim we can make and it is the one that matters: a performance framework that survives two years without the consultants who built it has been adopted rather than merely installed.
The measure of this kind of work is not whether the client keeps paying you. It is whether the thing still runs after you stop being there to run it.
Constraints that shaped the work
Three years is a long engagement and it is fair to ask why. Part of the answer is that adoption genuinely takes that long in a business with forty years of habit. Part of it is that we were doing work the client could eventually have done themselves — the weekly checking, the chasing of stale trackers — and a sharper version of this engagement would have handed that specific routine over sooner and built an internal owner for it earlier.
The other thing we would change is how we recorded our own work. Adherence was reviewed throughout and teams were pushed to correct where they had drifted, but those reviews were run to resolve problems rather than to log a number. So we can describe the mechanism in detail and cannot show you a compliance figure at the start against one at the end. Capturing it would have cost almost nothing as a by-product of reviews we were running anyway, and it is the one statistic that would let a reader judge this without taking our word for it.
If your processes are documented and still not followed
Documentation is not the problem and more documentation will not fix it. Nothing depends on adherence, so adherence decays — and it decays department by department, which is why the symptom you see is friction at the handoffs rather than a process failure anywhere in particular.
What changes it is a routine that checks, someone whose job is to notice, and a manager population that can have the resulting conversation. The framework is the easy part and it is not where the money goes.
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Every figure sourced from the client’s own systems, with the basis stated and the exclusions named.Bawarchi Atlanta
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Measurement note. Role counts, engagement scope and duration are from our own project records. The revenue movement and white-collar headcount are figures given to us by the client during the engagement and were not independently audited by us. Whether the systems remain in use is confirmed by the client.
