There are many manufacturing consultants today who deal in all aspects of manufacturing and can help a client company identify its bottlenecks, improve their overall functions, and ultimately improve profit margins. These manufacturing consultants focus on different fields such as strategy consulting, troubleshooting, reverse engineering, heavy engineering, quality and operations, training of personnel, method improvement and yield improvement. Organizational development, industrial automation, robotics and even succession planning.

Most of the leading manufacturing consultants in India work on an 8  step model process that includes building a balanced relationship, clarifying their role, practising scope control, cementing trust with the team, identifying recurring bottlenecks and hindrances in the manufacturing process and recommending solutions.

Manufacturing consultants in India usually depute a team of experts in the client company's field and in the product that the client manufactures. Consultants are hired for their knowledge, skill and experience. Once deputed, the team of the manufacturing consultant works with the client's team and identifies problem areas that adversely affect productivity and, thereby, the profit margins. The biggest contribution of the consulting team is their unbiased feedback and support, especially during restructuring drives. Manufacturing consultants gain access to new ideas, new schemes, skills and, often, a new technology that does not exist within the client company. Consultants provide expertise in diverse areas such as strategy, planning, development of new products, tapping emerging markets and financial skills. Many manufacturing consultants have the potential to make a significant contribution and have even turned many companies around. There are generalist and specialist consultants that provide diverse consulting services.

Several manufacturing consultants have helped bring in concepts of TPM (Total Productivity Maintenance), 6 sigma, FMEA (Failure mode evaluation analysis) and Lean. The introduction of these practices along training and implementation have improved profit margins by 20 to as high as 50% in several companies.

Competent manufacturing consultants target individual departments as diverse as supply chain management in which they improve cost-effective sourcing and vendor development. However, the core area of manufacturing consulting remains the reduction of production costs by reducing rework, cutting down breakdowns and unnecessary stoppages, along with downsizing production based on real-time customer and market requirements. Downsizing and right sizing production reduces inventory and ensures production of only fast selling products. All these steps ultimately reflect an increase in profit margins as manufacturing consultants help bring about these lean changes within the organization.

There are many manufacturing consultant firms that encourage the formation of cross-functional teams and encourage members from the client company's workforce to come up with innovative ideas. They add their own ideas and help implement them after combining all the ideas into a workable package. Conventional terms such as high throughput, high capacity utilization and economic order quantities now give way to effectively increasing capacity utilization by producing dead stock, which reduce profitability by stockpiling inventory that has to be disposed later by way of E auctions at a reduced price. Manufacturing consultants get to this solution by getting the production, planning and marketing teams together and eliminating their traditional rivalry to enhance the overall performance of their client companies. Close coordination between these key divisions is the secret of ultimate success.