When people hear the word consultant, they often imagine discussions about corporate strategy or high-level management decisions. I used to think the same way. In my company, consultants were typically involved with departments close to management, and even today those departments sometimes use consulting firms for information gathering.
However, I once had the opportunity to work with consultants myself as an owner’s engineer in charge of mechanical and electrical engineering at a chemical plant.
In this article, I will explain why we consulted them and what kind of issues we were trying to solve. We did not complete a full evaluation of the results, but I believe consulting can still be considered one possible option when facing organizational challenges.
The Goal: Improving Work Efficiency
For owner’s engineers in mechanical or electrical engineering roles, the most common reason to involve consultants is likely improving work efficiency. That was exactly our situation.
In Japan, the declining birthrate and aging workforce are already affecting engineering recruitment. At the same time, jobs related to production engineering and maintenance have gradually become less attractive to students.
On top of that, companies have started to place stronger limits on overtime work.
As a result, we felt that internal efforts alone might not be enough to transform the organization, so we decided to bring in a consulting firm to analyze the situation.
Organizational Analysis
When consultants are asked to help with operational efficiency, the first step is usually understanding the current state of the organization. This means analyzing the structure of the team and how work is actually being performed.
Workforce Structure
The consultants first examined the age distribution and staffing balance within the organization.
For example, it is common to find organizations where there are many employees in their 50s and 20s but relatively few in the middle generations.
In production engineering teams, mechanical and electrical engineers may handle both design work and maintenance work within the same group. When these roles are combined, the staffing analysis also becomes aggregated, and the unique circumstances of each career stage are not always reflected.
In large organizations, this kind of imbalance may not be very noticeable. However, in smaller plants the differences become much more visible.
In my case, the entire team had fewer than 20 members. If you divide that number across four generations—20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s—you end up with roughly five people per generation. With such a small sample size, even a slight fluctuation can significantly affect the overall balance.
Work Time Analysis
Consultants also analyze how engineers spend their working time.
This is usually done through interviews with team members or, in some cases, by observing the engineers directly while they work.
If the goal of efficiency improvement is connected to reducing overtime hours, this analysis becomes particularly important.
However, the results are rarely fully satisfying.
Many engineers rarely have the opportunity to objectively analyze their own work. In addition, engineering work often involves a large amount of coordination with other departments, which means there are fewer repetitive or standardized tasks that are easy to measure.
Short observation periods also make it difficult to understand the full picture of someone’s work.
To obtain reliable results, time-use analysis requires a sufficient number of participants and a long observation period. Without that, the results cannot be properly averaged.
The situation becomes even more complicated when people in the same team perform very different roles—for example, design engineers working mostly in the office and maintenance engineers working frequently in the field.
Work Standards
Consultants can also evaluate the general level of engineering practices within the organization.
This evaluation does not usually focus on deep technical expertise. Instead, it tends to examine whether the organizational framework and processes are functioning properly.
For owner’s engineers, even specialized technical audits rarely go deeply into these aspects, so having a third party evaluate them can still be useful.
Typical evaluation points include:
- Whether design standards exist (both internal and external standards)
- Whether a clear design workflow is defined (design → review → approval)
- Whether work management systems are in place (task systems, email management, progress tracking)
- How spare parts are managed for maintenance
These elements are compared with general practices in other companies.
From an engineer’s perspective, some of these points may not feel particularly essential. However, since most engineers rarely have the opportunity to see how other companies operate, the comparison can still be interesting.
That said, even if consultants point out that standards are lacking, it does not necessarily mean the company will actually expand those standards.
Clarifying the Purpose of the Organization
During discussions with consultants, the topic may eventually shift to the fundamental purpose of the organization.
This becomes a much more complex conversation.
The role of an owner’s engineer in a chemical plant is not universally defined. Each company operates differently, and corporate policies do not always align perfectly with the goals of engineering teams.
Consultants sometimes present case studies from other companies and outline possible directions the organization could take.
For engineers who have already thought deeply about these issues, the final conclusion may not be very surprising. You might even feel that the consultant simply confirmed what you already suspected.
Even so, that confirmation alone can make the discussion worthwhile.
Setting Future Goals
When consultants are involved in efficiency improvement projects, they often create a roadmap toward a future organizational model.
This usually includes prioritizing issues and mapping out improvement initiatives over several years.
Whether this roadmap actually works depends heavily on the company.
Organizations that are already capable of improving themselves often make progress even without consultants.
On the other hand, companies that struggle with internal change might use the consultant’s recommendations as a catalyst. Sometimes the statement “the consultants recommended this” can make it easier to push reforms forward.
However, if improvements still do not happen even after consulting support, it may reveal deeper organizational problems.
A Critical Issue: Organizational Barriers
When consultants propose improvements, engineers often find themselves thinking the same thing:
“If it were that easy, we would have done it already.”
In many cases, the real problem is not technical—it is organizational barriers.
Engineering tasks frequently involve coordination with other departments. Even when engineers identify unnecessary work and want to eliminate it, someone else’s approval is often required.
For example, suppose the goal is to shorten design time by removing redundant document checks.
In theory, if the design documents are already shared with manufacturing, it might be possible to skip certain verification steps.
However, manufacturing teams may still want to review the specifications separately to avoid the risk of receiving equipment with incorrect specifications.
As a result, the additional review step cannot be removed, and the waiting time for approvals becomes a source of inefficiency.
These kinds of internal dynamics are difficult for consultants to fully understand. In many cases, the issue ends up summarized in broad terms such as “standardizing design documents,” which then becomes a long-term improvement goal.
Even if consultants provide suggestions, it is important to remember that the responsibility for implementing those changes ultimately lies with the engineers inside the organization.
Conclusion
Consulting firms can help analyze an organization, identify inefficiencies, and propose future directions. However, their recommendations alone cannot transform an organization.
In engineering organizations, many inefficiencies originate not from technical limitations but from organizational relationships and decision-making structures.
For that reason, consulting should be seen as a tool for gaining external perspective rather than a complete solution.
Ultimately, the engineers working within the organization are the ones who must turn those ideas into real improvements.
About the Author – NEONEEET
A user‑side chemical plant engineer with 20+ years of end‑to‑end experience across design → production → maintenance → corporate planning. Sharing practical, experience‑based knowledge from real batch‑plant operations. → View full profile
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