How a PE sponsor finally saw inside its CPG portfolio company.

The mandate

A private equity sponsor engaged Aperture on a consumer goods company it owns. The mandate: see how order-to-delivery actually runs, from the sales plan through outsourced production, third-party logistics, and per-channel settlement. Planning ran on a monthly clock; orders and stockouts ran daily; the only place the two ever met was a meeting.

The challenge: the clocks never meet

• The plan is stale by construction. Retail channels confirm promotions days before they run; production was committed months earlier. Nobody is negligent. The clocks simply never meet.
• Uncertainty quietly turns into inventory. A stockout is a visible failure and overstock is a quiet one, so every number gets rounded up on the way to a purchase order.
• The company's memory is one spreadsheet. Stock scattered across warehouses becomes a single picture in one person's daily file: excellent work, and a single point of failure.
• The supply chain was capping revenue. The headline was not a cost item: promotions were being held back because supply could not support them. The constraint showed up as missed growth before it ever showed up as cost.

The work: what actually shipped

Here’s what the sponsor got, one conversation in:

Looking ahead: from diagnosis to standing layer

Sold as a four-week diagnosis, the engagement stayed on as the sponsor’s standing visibility layer: the live map, the agent, and the dashboard keep running while Phase 1 turns the ranked findings into value-creation work. And the engine compounds across the fund: portcos that share workflow logic get automated once per cluster, so by the fifth portco the team pattern-matches instead of starting from zero.