Case Study
About
The assignment
The methodology was straightforward in principle and difficult in practice: interview the people doing the work, surface where the real inefficiencies lived, and build the findings into business cases that leadership could act on. What made it hard was the ask itself. The people I was interviewing weren’t being asked to point fingers at someone else’s department. They were being asked to surface problems in their own — processes they ran, vendor relationships they managed, reports their teams spent hours producing. They were, in effect, showing me how to cut their own budgets.
Getting people to do that honestly isn’t a process question. It’s a trust question. I was an outsider in every room I walked into — no formal authority, no prior relationships, and a mandate that wasn’t obviously in their interest. Building the kind of trust that leads to honest answers required time, consistency, and genuine curiosity about how the work actually functioned before drawing any conclusions about what should change.
One person described a report their team ran manually every week — hours of work that could have been automated years earlier but had never been questioned. It was the first time they’d raised it, because they understood exactly what it would mean for their job. That kind of disclosure only happens when someone believes the person across the table will handle what they’ve shared with care.
Scope
Context
Company-wide transformation
One of 30 employees selected from across Panasonic Avionics to lead a company-wide cost transformation — embedded full-time for six months.
Scope
3 departments
Embedded across procurement, travel, and facilities — departments with no prior relationship and every reason to be guarded.
Duration
6 months
Pulled entirely out of normal role, embedded full-time across unfamiliar departments throughout the organization.
Result
Hundreds of millions
Contributed to a company-wide transformation that removed hundreds of millions from the operating budget.
My Approach
From trust-building to business cases to the executive committee.
Step 1
The methodology
The work started the same way in each department: interviews — not surface-level ones, but conversations designed to get people to be genuinely honest about how their operations actually ran. What I was asking of them was difficult: to surface inefficiencies in their own work, flag processes they knew weren’t functioning, and identify vendor relationships that had outlived their logic. They were essentially showing me how to cut their own budgets.
Conducted deep interviews across procurement, travel, and facilities
Built real trust as an outsider with no authority
Earned disclosures that surfaced inefficiencies people had never raised before
Step 2
From conversations to business cases
The findings from those interviews became raw material. My job was to shape them into something an executive committee could act on: structured business cases with baseline costs, projected savings, and clear implementation paths. One pattern surfaced consistently across departments — vendor contracts that had been auto-renewing for years without scrutiny. We mapped every contract across the company, identified the ones that hadn’t been renegotiated in years, and worked through them systematically. I personally led one of those negotiations, bringing the contract down by nearly half.
Mapped every vendor contract across the company for renewal scrutiny
Personally led one contract negotiation — brought it down by nearly half
Shaped interview findings into structured executive-ready business cases
Step 3
In the room
Every business case ultimately went to the executive committee — the CEO, COO, CTO, and senior leadership. I was in the room when they were presented. When cases were challenged, I argued them. When the operational details needed unpacking, I could speak to both the front-line reality and the financial logic, because I’d spent months in both worlds simultaneously.
Presented directly to CEO, COO, CTO, and senior leadership
Argued challenged cases from both front-line and financial perspectives
Meaningful number of cases across three departments were accepted
The broader pattern
Every company has a gap between what leadership believes is happening and what’s actually happening at the operational level.
Closing that gap requires someone willing to do the patient, relationship-intensive work of earning honest answers — and then translating what they hear into something leadership can act on.
That translation is most of what I do.
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