James Storrow

Manager at Kaizen Institute, with six years spent helping organisations improve how their operations run. Joined as a consultant in 2020 after studying Chemical Engineering at the University of Leeds, and now leads a portfolio of client programmes and a small team of consultants.

Most of the work happens on the shop floor alongside the people who run the operation: mapping how work actually flows, finding where time and effort get lost, and building standards and routines with the team so the improvements last. A lot of it starts with leading value stream analyses, bringing cross-functional teams together to map the end-to-end process, agree a future state and build the roadmap to get there. Sectors include paper manufacturing, heavy machinery assembly, warehousing and logistics, water utilities, retail and food processing.

Recent projects include improving machine uptime at a paper mill, redesigning a warehouse layout to reduce travel and improve productivity, building a planning tool to cut an international business’s reliance on air freight, and helping a water utility reduce unnecessary field visits by its technicians and contractors. Also coaches engineers and frontline teams in structured problem solving.