Four consecutive record months, and a leadership team that could explain why.

The situation (2024 to 2025)

JSW Steel USA runs electric arc furnace steelmaking at Mingo Junction, Ohio and plate and pipe operations at Baytown, Texas, as part of the JSW Group. Mingo supplies more than 90 percent of Baytown's slabs, which means the two plants are one supply chain and a bad week at one is a bad month at the other.

A new chief executive, Robert Simon, brought Pilot in to align the two facilities and build the culture that would strengthen the company's position in its market and ready it for growth and capital investment.

It was the fifth time he had done it. Simon first worked with Pilot at Oregon Steel Mills, then engaged the firm at Bayou Steel Group, Steel Dynamics and Evraz North America, and then at JSW Steel USA as its chief executive. Three decades, five companies, five separate decisions to spend his own budget and his own standing on the same operating standard. This was not a rescue. It was a company getting itself fit for what came next, which is where most of the value in a Fractional COO engagement actually sits.

Three fronts: safety, shipping, and customer service. Safety is paramount in heavy industry and it is never a project.

The problem showing up in front of customers was on-time delivery in full. It was not a melting problem. Shipping was difficult, production was hard to align against it, and every attempt to force alignment aggravated internal material handling and product tracking. Steel that cannot be found is steel that cannot ship.

What we did

• Named the three numbers that actually described the loop. Reject rates, mislocated and lost plates, and OTIF. The middle one is the one nobody puts on a dashboard. Reject rates and OTIF are what every mill says it tracks. A plate nobody can locate in the yard is unglamorous, and it is where the other two numbers come from.
• Those three are a chain rather than a scorecard. A plate that cannot be found becomes a late order, a late order becomes a substitution, a substitution becomes a reject, and the reject puts the next order late. Tracked together they show the loop. Tracked separately they let three departments each defend a number while the customer waits.
• Installed a daily, weekly, quarterly cadence. Daily to recover from the previous day's setbacks and restore the schedule. Weekly to work the setbacks that will not clear in a day and whatever the customer now needs. Quarterly to set the sales and operating plan, with maintenance and customer issues inside that plan rather than argued beside it.
• Built ownership in shipping rather than authority over it. The work there was repeated sessions with the entire shipping staff to establish what should be happening and how they would get there. Not a system imposed on them. A standard they came to own.
• Refined their program instead of replacing it. Most companies at this stage need a detailed operating program and do not have one that works. JSW had one. The coaching was on refining theirs.
• Worked the leadership at every level. Leaders who could not meet the standard were replaced, coached, or relocated, at each level of the structure. Which outcome applied to whom stays inside the engagement.
• Held safety as the cultural absolute, and claimed no rate for it. There is no safety number on this page and there will not be one. Safety performance in a plant of this size has too many contributors for any outside advisor to take credit for a rate, and an advisor who quotes you one is telling you something about himself rather than about your plant. What an advisor can do is keep safety where it belongs, as the price of admission to the workplace rather than an objective traded against the other two, and build the capability underneath it. Here that meant teaching root cause analysis into the organization and working at awareness continuously, which is not a campaign and does not end.
• Led the root cause investigation after a major safety incident, and wrote the plan they restarted under. The incident shut an operation down for 45 days. Pilot led the formal root cause analysis and produced the company's Safe Return to Operations Plan. Rob Simon records that work in his own endorsement.

A 45-day shutdown is the moment an operating company finds out what its root cause capability is actually worth, because the plan that comes out of it is read by insurers, by customers, by the workforce that has to walk back in, and by everyone who will decide whether this happens again. It is also the moment a chief executive learns whether his advisor will tell him what the investigation found or what the company would prefer it found.

What is listed above is the spine of the engagement rather than the whole of it. A year inside a company of this size surfaces far more than five things, and most of what gets worked never makes a case study because it is unglamorous.