Operations consultants study how clients run their work and redesign it for speed, cost and quality. They spend weeks on client sites, away from their own office, and the people who do this well are hard to find and harder to keep.
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Share your requirementsAn operations consultancy helps manufacturers, hospitals, retailers and service firms improve how work flows. The team has a lead consultant who sells and guides, senior consultants who run projects, analysts who collect data and map processes, and sometimes specialists in lean methods, scheduling or inventory. Projects last weeks or months, with time spent on client premises watching work, timing tasks and talking to supervisors. Findings are only useful if the client changes what it does, and change is slow. Consultants travel, work in dusty or noisy plants, and endure long days away from home. Between projects, there is a gap of reports, proposals and waiting. Know-how sits in a few experienced heads. See also HR for professional services.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in operations consultants. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Weeks away from home, in plain lodging, with long hours on the client's floor, exhaust analysts.
Between projects there is little to do, and during a project everything lands at once.
Supervisors see the consultant as a threat, give poor data and wait for the project to end.
Findings are assembled in the final week by one person, and quality depends on that person's energy.
A senior knows how to run a time study or design a layout, and the analyst just follows instructions.
They collect data in the background and do not learn to present or handle a client room.
Consultants enter plants and warehouses with little briefing, protective gear or insurance clarity.
A client impressed by the work offers a permanent operations role at home.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Health, Safety and Wellbeing; Learning and Development. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a operations consultants business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A rolling view of who is on which project and when they are free, with useful internal work for gaps.
A rolling view of who is on which project and when they are free, with useful internal work for gaps. See workforce planning and leave cover.
Maximum stretches away, rest after long trips, fair allowances and a contact person.
Maximum stretches away, rest after long trips, fair allowances and a contact person. Record in documentation.
Worked examples of time studies, layouts and process maps, with templates, so analysts can learn from past projects.
Worked examples of time studies, layouts and process maps, with templates, so analysts can learn from past projects.
First data collection, then a section of the report, then a client presentation.
First data collection, then a section of the report, then a client presentation. Link to learning plans.
A short site checklist, protective gear and a named client contact.
A short site checklist, protective gear and a named client contact. See health and safety.
Mid-project reviews with findings drafted early, so the final report is not written in a rush.
Mid-project reviews with findings drafted early, so the final report is not written in a rush.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Rest after site stays and cover between projects.
Site briefings and gear for consultants working in client plants.
A route from data collector to presenter built around real projects.
A method library and travel norms that outlast any one project.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
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How a D2C founder can decide which digital marketing work to hire for, which to buy from an agency, and which to split, with a worksheet and a five step plan.
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A shift, weekly and monthly safety routine for rubber plants that names who checks platen guards, mill trip bars, autoclave doors, burst-test cages and slings, and who acts on near misses.
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A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Cap stretches away, give rest after long trips, rotate site duty and pay allowances fairly. Tired analysts make poor notes.
Use the time for method building, proposals, learning and writing up past work. Make it planned, not leftover.
Involve supervisors early, share findings with them first and credit their ideas. People help when they are not surprised.
Let them shadow a senior, give worked examples and move them into small client tasks. Reports teach more than lectures.
Both sides have duties. Brief your people, provide gear and agree responsibilities in writing, then confirm legal points with a qualified professional.
How projects are staffed, how long people spend away, where method knowledge sits and why analysts leave. A bench plan, a method library or a site-safety brief is a likely start. Scope, timing and fees are put in writing after that talk.
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