Board engagement
Board-ready Bearing interpretation delivered ahead of LP reporting deadline
Industrial Manufacturing · PE portfolio
The challenge
A portfolio company had experienced 18 months of execution difficulty following an ERP implementation that had disrupted operational processes across the business. The PE firm needed to present a coherent, honest account of the situation to its LPs — including what had gone wrong, what had been learned, and what direction the business was now taking — without simply reciting management's own narrative.
What Wexler Gray surfaced
Bearing synthesis of four Parallel cycles identified that the ERP implementation had been a proximate cause but not the root cause of the operating difficulty: the deeper issue was a failure to sequence the implementation around operational capacity, driven by an overly aggressive technology transformation timeline approved at board level
Parallel assessment across the four cycles traced the deterioration and partial recovery of Operational Discipline (from 71 to 38 to 52 to 61) in detail, providing a data-grounded narrative of the operational journey that the LP report could draw on directly
Bearing identified three specific structural improvements that had been made as a result of the experience: a revised capital project governance framework, a new change management capability within the COO's function, and a restated technology strategy that prioritized operational stability over capability advancement
Outcome
The LP report was presented with the Bearing interpretation as an appendix, providing the firm's LPs with independent evidence of organizational learning rather than simply management assertion. LP feedback on the reporting quality was notably positive. The portfolio company's Operational Discipline score reached 68 in the next cycle — above its pre-implementation baseline.
Engagement brief
Request the full engagement brief.
Available to PE operating teams and portfolio company leadership. The brief covers methodology, operator composition, and the full assessment output.