Do you work outside São Paulo state?

Yes. Past projects have taken place in Bento Gonçalves, Belo Horizonte, and Curitiba. Travel costs are billed at cost and discussed transparently before any engagement begins. For a Diagnostic Sprint outside São Paulo, expect to add roughly R$ 800 to R$ 1.500 in travel depending on location.

How long does a Diagnostic Sprint take?

Two to four days on-site, depending on the size and complexity of the operation. The written report is delivered within five business days of the final site day. Most clients have the report in hand within two weeks of the initial call.

Do you work with very small factories?

The smallest operation we have worked with had fourteen employees. The largest had around 340. The diagnostic approach scales. What matters more than headcount is whether the owner or manager is genuinely willing to look at what the data shows, even when it is inconvenient.

Factory Fulcrum

The thinking behind the work

Where the load shifts

Factory Fulcrum works with mid-size industrial and manufacturing businesses in Brazil to find the one or two operational changes that actually move the needle. Not a hundred-slide deck. A clear diagnosis and a plan you can act on Monday.

Rafael Menezes spent eleven years inside manufacturing before he started Factory Fulcrum in 2019. The first eight of those years were at a corrugated packaging plant in Jundiaí, where he moved from process engineer to operations manager. The last three were at a food-processing company in Campinas, where he was brought in specifically to reduce waste on a high-speed filling line. He did reduce it, by about 34 percent over eighteen months, but the more interesting thing he learned there was why the waste had persisted for so long despite everyone knowing it was a problem. The answer, almost always, was that the people with the data and the people with the authority were not in the same room at the same time.

That observation became the foundation of Factory Fulcrum. The name comes from a simple mechanical idea: a fulcrum does not add force, it changes where the force is applied. Most industrial businesses Rafael has worked with since 2019 do not lack effort or investment. They lack a clear point of application. The diagnostic work is about finding that point. The redesign work is about moving the load. He opened the consultancy out of a small office in the Vila Madalena neighbourhood of São Paulo, with one laptop, a subscription to a process-mapping tool, and a list of six contacts from his years in the industry. The first client was a metal-stamping shop in Santo André that had been running a three-shift operation with a chronic bottleneck on its second press. The fix took nine weeks and cost less than one month of the scrap they had been generating.

Wide-angle view of an active manufacturing floor with overhead lighting and production equipment — Use points for industrial businesses

What we actually do

Operational diagnosis

We spend two to four days on-site, walking the floor, sitting in shift handovers, reading maintenance logs. The output is a short written report. Usually eight to twelve pages. That names the specific bottlenecks costing you throughput or margin.

Process redesign

Once the bottleneck is named, we help redesign the process around it. That might mean a new scheduling logic, a different layout, a changed handover protocol. We stay involved until the change is running, not just documented.

Leadership alignment

Most operational problems are also communication problems between shifts, departments, or ownership and management. We facilitate structured conversations that get the right people looking at the same numbers and agreeing on what to fix first.

News & Announcements

2025-10-05

How to read a maintenance log before calling a consultant

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of industrial maintenance: the factories most likely to call a consultant in a panic are often the same ones sitting on months — sometimes years — of extraordinarily detailed stoppage records that nobody has properly read. The data exists. It was entered, shift by shift, by technicians who knew exactly what broke and roughly why. It sits in a CMMS, or a shared spreadsheet, or a folder of printed-and-scanned sheets in a grey filing cabinet near the compressor room. Before you spend a day-rate on an outside eye, it is worth spending an afternoon on what your own people already wrote down. This guide is about how to do that — not as an exercise in data science, but as an act of careful reading, the kind a good editor brings to a manuscript or a good detective brings to a witness statement. The goal is not a dashboard. The goal is three or four sentences you can say out loud with confidence: here is what is actually happening, here is when it happens, here is what we have already tried.

2026-05-04

The five scheduling assumptions that break when your product range doubles

There is a particular kind of calm that settles over a production floor that has found its rhythm. The changeovers happen in a familiar sequence, the machine operators know without being told which job follows which, and the planner's spreadsheet — or the MRP screen behind it — hums along matching demand to capacity with something approaching grace. Then the sales team lands a new product range. Then another. And the calm, without any single dramatic event to mark its passing, is gone. This article is about what happens in that interval — the period after the SKU count doubles but before anyone has admitted that the scheduling logic built for the old range is no longer fit for purpose. It names five specific assumptions that break, describes what breaking looks like on the shop floor, and offers concrete ways to catch each failure mode before it shows up in a late-delivery report.

2025-07-14

What a good shift handover actually contains

There is a moment, somewhere around the forty-fifth minute of a new shift, when a supervisor stops walking and stares at a machine that should not be running the way it is running. Nobody told him. The outgoing shift knew — they had been nursing it for three hours — but the telling got lost in the noise of a busy changeover, a quick joke by the clock-out terminal, a foreman who was already thinking about the drive home. That moment of staring, of not knowing, is not a communication failure in any dramatic sense. It is quieter than that, and far more expensive. This article is about what a good shift handover actually contains: the specific categories of information, the reasons a verbal account of even the most conscientious outgoing team reliably drops critical details, and the practical shape of a written format that changes — measurably, perceptibly — how a new crew spends its first two hours on the floor.

A few words from us

Rafael Menezes

Founder, Established since 2019

Rafael Menezes grew up in Ribeirão Preto and studied industrial engineering at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, graduating in 2007. He spent eight years at a corrugated packaging plant in Jundiaí, rising from process engineer to operations manager, before moving to a food-processing company in Campinas where he led an eighteen-month waste-reduction project on a high-speed filling line. In 2019 he founded Factory Fulcrum in São Paulo, drawing on those years of floor-level work rather than theory. He reads widely in systems thinking and keeps a running notebook of process observations from every site visit. On weekends he restores vintage bicycles in the garage of his apartment building in Vila Madalena.

Factory Fulcrum

Where the load shifts

Press bottleneck, metal stamping, Santo André

Filling line waste, food processing, Campinas

Shift handover breakdown, plastics, Sorocaba

Scheduling logic, furniture manufacturing, Bento Gonçalves

Ready to find your fulcrum point?