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Foundational
Digital Kaizen is a sequenced programme for mid-market manufacturers: disciplined shop-floor improvement as the foundation, digital tools and AI as the multipliers on top. Deployed by senseis, audited against a 100-day plan, measured in EBITDA.
Most mid-market manufacturers operate at 50–65% OEE, carry excess working capital, lack real-time cost visibility, and under-extract incentives. Dashboards get installed. Sensors get wired. AI gets licensed. And nothing moves.
The missing layer is process knowledge — the tacit know-how that converts digital tools into productive action. Without it, digital does not stick.
Digital Kaizen is the coupling. Kaizen routines — PDCA, standard work, Gemba — are the vehicle through which process knowledge accumulates. Digital tools are the multiplier. Deployed together, in sequence, they compound.
Each intervention is deployed only once the foundation beneath it is functioning. Instrumentation before analytics. Analytics before AI.
Manually-measured OEE baseline. Tiered stand-ups from line team to executive. Visible, physical, self-sustaining within 60 days.
Twelve to twenty Kaizen events in year one, led by senseis with explicit capability transfer. A3, 5-Why, DMAIC matched to problem size.
Vendor-agnostic sensors and gateways feeding a standard reference architecture. Full instrumentation in 3–6 months.
Three time horizons, three audiences. Every dashboard owns a decision. Charts without action attached are deleted.
Predictive maintenance, machine vision, demand forecasting, yield optimisation, energy. Deployed selectively — never for its own sake.
Cobots, AGVs, vision-guided and process-specific. Applied where Kaizen cannot move the ceiling — not to automate existing waste.
An integrated digital backbone in which a customer order flows from CRM through ERP planning, MES execution, instrumented production and dispatch — every step visible, every step measurable. The platform on which AI decision-making actually sits.
Process knowledge is the coupling.— Digital Kaizen, first principles
Without it, digital does not stick.
We engage with owners, boards and operations teams where leadership is committed to a multi-year programme.
Pre-sale value creation, post-acquisition integration, family businesses preparing the next generation.
COOs, plant managers and operations directors who want the tools, standard work and capability to sustain gains.
Private-equity investors deploying Digital Kaizen into portfolio companies as a repeatable value-creation programme.
A sequenced programme — operations first, digital as multiplier — deployed through the same 100-day foundations on every engagement and compounded over a multi-year horizon.
Everything we do must clear these lines before work begins.
If the shop floor cannot hold a standard for 30 consecutive days, no software gets installed. Stability is a precondition for digital, not a product of it.
Every claim is instrumented. OEE, throughput, working capital, energy, yield — each has a data line back to a sensor, a scanner, or a signed measurement.
Tools transfer; tacit know-how does not. Every intervention includes explicit capability transfer — sensei-to-team, documented, assessed.
No licence survives an 18-month payback test. Dashboards without attached decisions are deleted. AI without measurable lift is turned off.
A single reference architecture across the engagement. No lock-in. Interoperable data layer so capability and playbooks travel.
The engagement is successful only when the plant can sustain the programme without us. Sensei disengagement is scheduled from day one.
Every intervention corresponds to a level. A business cannot be moved to Level 4 without passing through 2 and 3.
Process knowledge is the coupling.— Digital Kaizen, first principles
Without it, digital does not stick.
Each intervention has a specific output, a payback window, and a capability it transfers.
Every Digital Kaizen engagement begins the same way — with a two-week diagnostic — and scales from there. Choose the track that fits the business.
A two-week on-site assessment. Manual OEE baseline, loss ranking, value-creation bridge, capability audit. Ends with a signed 100-day plan.
The full foundational programme. Daily management live, first Kaizen events complete, instrumentation plan signed off. You run the rest.
End-to-end deployment through all seven interventions. Monthly steering. Embedded senseis. Handover milestones at month 18 and 36.
A single template applied to every client. Variance lies in the findings, not the process.
Manual OEE captured on every major asset. Finance and operations reconciled to one number. Top 20 losses ranked by EBITDA impact.
Tiered daily management live from line to executive. Three Kaizen events completed on highest-ranked losses. Standard work documented for the top-three products.
Sensor rollout complete on critical assets. Reference architecture live. First real-time dashboards retired their manual equivalents.
Value-creation plan signed by management and board. Three-year EBITDA bridge agreed. Capability transfer plan published. Year-one Kaizen calendar locked.
Across 40+ prior engagements, value resolves into six components. Shape is consistent; mix varies.
We are selective. An engagement only works when management is committed and the business has the scale to compound.
Digital Kaizen is led by a small team of practice partners with decades of shop-floor experience, supported by a panel of senseis and implementation specialists deployed to clients as needed.
Four partners. Every engagement signed by one; every engagement accountable to all.
Author of the Digital Kaizen playbook. Twenty years across operational strategy and digital transformation. Prior partner-track at a top-tier operational consulting firm; led 30+ manufacturing engagements across the SADC region.
Career operator. Plant manager, operations director, then group COO across three mid-market manufacturers before joining the practice. Runs the 100-day plan and the on-site operating cadence.
Leads the digital stack — reference architecture, AI deployment, ERP integration. Previously group head of manufacturing technology at a JSE-listed industrial. Author of the IoT playbook and vendor evaluation rubric.
Leads client service, engagement scoping, and B-BBEE / skills-development integration. Fifteen years across industrials and transformation-aligned advisory. Chair of the practice's governance committee.
A panel of independent senseis, engineers and domain specialists we deploy into client sites under short-term engagement.
Eight Kaizen senseis on retainer. Average 20 years of shop-floor experience. Deployed into events by sector.
Former plant managers and operations directors available as interim leadership during transition.
Engineers specialising in IoT rollout, MES integration and dashboard engineering.
Applied ML engineers for predictive maintenance, machine vision, forecasting and yield optimisation.
Revenue-management specialists deployed when commercial uplift is a material line in the bridge.
Specialists in S12-I, APDP, AIS and SEZ application, with in-house government-relations support.
Every claim has a citation, every number has a sensor or a signed source. Narratives that cannot be audited do not survive the 100-day plan.
Our senseis work in blues, not suits. Most of the engagement happens on the shop floor, next to the asset, with the people running it.
The engagement is successful when the plant can run the programme without us. Sensei disengagement is scheduled in the 100-day plan, not negotiated at month 24.
Every engagement includes a named skills-development plan mapped to B-BBEE and SETA frameworks — not as a bolt-on, but as part of how the programme compounds.
A bi-weekly newsletter, occasional papers, and our annual State of Manufacturing letter. Written by the partners, for operators and investors.
Before we install a sensor, sign a licence, or run an event, we draw a VSM. Not because the model is fashionable — because it forces the question: which subsystem is actually broken, and which one is just loud? Twelve pages on using VSM as a pre-diagnostic.
Working papers, conference submissions and our annual State of Manufacturing letter.
Empirical study across 40 mid-market manufacturers. Documents the 18-month dip in productivity that follows most digital transformations, and proposes the Digital Kaizen coupling as the mitigating structure.
Catalyst's annual letter. Commentary on energy, localisation, APDP reform, SEZ uptake, and the supply-side conditions facing mid-market manufacturers into FY26.
Catalyst's vendor-agnostic reference architecture. Covers edge, gateway, historian, analytics and AI layers. The technical appendix to the Digital Kaizen programme.
One edition every other Thursday. Occasional papers. Our annual letter. Written by the partners.
We route every enquiry through one of three channels. Please choose the one that fits — it gets your message to the right partner fastest.
LP enquiries. Pitch book and LPA under NDA. Fund structure, terms, track record diligence.
Founders, shareholders, and management considering a sale or partnership.
Media, speaking, advisors, careers, partnerships, and everything else.
Leave your details. A member of the investor-relations team — typically Nomvula — will reply within two business days with a mutual NDA and the full data room.
Investor-relations and pipeline enquiries are handled by named partners, not a shared inbox.
Cape Town for capital, Johannesburg for deal flow and operations.
Answers to the questions we field most often. More in the full fund documentation.