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<\/p>\nMatthew Cartwright is 28 and runs operations at Keltech. Over 200 production people report to him, and that number is about to grow as our new 50,000 sq ft building comes on stream.<\/p>\n
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It’s a senior job for someone his age, but here promotion comes down to what you can do, not how long you’ve been doing it. Matthew brings an accounting degree, a master’s in Operational Excellence, and an analytical approach to planning that has changed how this factory runs.<\/p>\n
It was 2020. Matthew was 22, with a Level 8 business degree from WIT (now SETU), specialising in accounting. The plan was to become a chartered accountant.<\/p>\n
Then COVID hit. „I was just applying for any job I could get, really,“ he says. Keltech offered him 20 hours a week in customer service. Within a couple of months he was full-time.<\/p>\n
He spent nine or ten months in customer service, then about five months in planning.<\/p>\n
At a performance review he asked about going on with his accountancy qualifications. Keltech was open to it, but it would have meant moving him into the accounts department. The company didn’t want to lose him from planning, so it came back with a different proposal: stay where he was, and Keltech would pay for a master’s in Operational Excellence instead.<\/p>\n
He said yes, and spent two years on the master’s (Lean Black Belt) at SETU while working full-time. Three promotions on from that customer service job, he now runs operations.<\/p>\n
There are two sides to it. One is running production day to day, over 200 people across the floor: health and safety, quality and productivity.<\/p>\n
The other is planning, which also reports to him: machine capacity, long-term planning, and the big calls on how many people we need, whether we need more machines and whether we add shifts.<\/p>\n
Most operations managers come up through production, as an operator, then a production manager. That experience is valuable. Matthew came from the office, and he sees the job differently.<\/p>\n
„I’m very numerical,“ he says. „It’s easy for me to analyse data and make decisions off it.“<\/p>\n
The accountancy means he understands how an operational decision lands financially. „It’s not all about the financial side,“ he says. „But it lets me make decisions that have a more beneficial impact on the business. I just have a slightly different view than a typical operations manager.“<\/p>\n
That view shapes how he uses lean. Traditional lean starts on the shop floor. You walk the line, spot the waste, and fix it with the people doing the work, using kaizen events and visual boards at each cell. That works, but it tends to favour the problems you can see.<\/p>\n
Matthew uses the same lean toolkit, but he starts with the numbers. The data shows where the machine hours, the rejects and the late orders actually are, and what fixing each one is worth to the business. That decides where the lean tools get used first.<\/p>\n
For years, operational calls at Keltech were made on gut feel. Matthew changed that.<\/p>\n
Working with our business intelligence and software team, he helped build KNET, a bespoke system that now sits at the centre of how we plan. It takes customer forecasts and the process routes from our ERP system and works out the machine hours and headcount we need, down to which areas and what skills.<\/p>\n
The same system tracks health and safety incidents, customer complaints, internal quality and shop-floor efficiency. Every metric sits on a dashboard and gets reviewed weekly, so a change either shows up in the numbers or it doesn’t.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, we couldn’t have told you our on-time delivery figure with any confidence. It wasn’t being measured properly. Today it’s tracked weekly, order by order, and it’s running at just over 90%. Internal quality rejections are down by about 20% over the same period.<\/p>\n
„From the customer side, what I’m hearing in the last 12 months is that our metrics are leading the way in their supply base,“ says Seamus Lawlor, Director of Business Development. „Customers notice that, and they’ve been giving us more work.“ A big share of our recent growth has come from existing customers doing exactly that.<\/p>\n
The new building gives final assembly close to four times the space it has had up to now, with a lot more final assembly work coming in 2027.<\/p>\n
Keltech has around 300 people today. Matthew expects we’ll need about 50 more by the end of Q1 2027.<\/p>\n
It’s a lot to plan for. The difference now is that the plan comes from the numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Matthew Cartwright is 28 and runs operations at Keltech. Over 200 production people report to him, and that number is about to grow as our new 50,000 sq ft building comes on stream. It’s a senior job for someone his age, but here promotion comes down to what you can … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5095,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n