Operational Excellence · Digital Transformation · Manufacturing
Pilots that survive the shop floor.
Most digital projects die between the dashboard and the machine. I build the ones that don't — because I've owned the P&L they were supposed to improve. Operational excellence and digital transformation are the same discipline, and I work both ends: Mexico first, and wherever a plant needs someone who has run operations on more than one continent.
The problem
Most quality problems aren't quality problems. They're operations problems that surface as scrap, rework, complaints and a supplier base nobody trusts. And most Industry 4.0 projects aren't technology problems — they're the same operations problems with a dashboard on top. Either way, fixing the symptom costs you twice.
Three things I'm actually useful for
Make the plant visible
Energy, environment, presence and equipment monitoring: sensors → edge box → one dashboard → alerts that reach a phone. Fixed scope, fixed price, handed to your team. Not a platform subscription — a thing that works and that you own.
Get the pilot to the machine
Roadmap, pilot cell, scale plan, OT/IT integration. Designed by someone who has implemented Leader Standard Work and Shopfloor Management, so the data lands in the daily management meeting instead of on a wall.
Make the numbers move
COPQ and cost-per-million-units, OEE, audit readiness (FSSC 22000, BRCGS, IFS), supplier and toller performance, crisis and recall. The discipline layer — the reason the first two survive contact with a real shift.
How it works
- Diagnostic call — free, 30 minutes. One plant, one honest read, end to end. You get a follow-up note whether or not we work together.
- On-site deep dive. A plant walk, interviews, one real pain point, a FROM → TO statement, a quick win, and a quotation with a 12-month roadmap. MXN 1,000 per hour on site plus travel, billed per iteration.
- The work. Alongside your team, handing over controls they run without me. If I'm still needed in a year, something went wrong.
Services
Smart building & IoT pilots — make the building tell you what it's doing
Most small plants, workshops and offices are run on memory and complaints. Nobody knows what the compressor costs, which room is actually cold, or that the freezer drifted for six hours on a Sunday. The instrumentation to know is no longer expensive — the reason it doesn't get installed is that nobody wants to own a half-finished system. So this is scoped to finish.
- A site visit and a written scope before anything is bought.
- Sensors and an edge box installed and labelled.
- One dashboard, built around the three or four questions you actually ask.
- Alerting with thresholds tuned on your data, not on defaults.
- A handover: documentation, credentials, and an hour of training. It's yours.
Fixed scope, fixed price, quoted after the on-site deep dive. Not residential smart-home installation, not a monthly platform fee, not a system only I can maintain.
Digital transformation & Industry 4.0 — the pilot is easy, scaling it is the job
Most Industry 4.0 programmes produce one impressive cell and one disappointed steering committee. The pilot works; it just never reaches the second line, because the plan was written by people who had never carried the plant's numbers. I have.
- A roadmap tied to money and risk — not a capability matrix.
- A pilot cell, chosen because it's representative, not because it's easy.
- A scale plan written at the same time as the pilot, so "phase 2" exists before phase 1 is celebrated.
- OT/IT integration, and data that lands in the daily management meeting.
Where a pilot has to touch the machine (PLC, SCADA, MES/ERP validation), it is scoped with a specialist integrator for that technology, named in the quotation, with responsibilities written down.
Operational excellence & quality — where quality starts being money
Most plants can tell you their scrap rate. Far fewer can tell you what scrap, rework, complaints, giveaway and downgrades cost together last month — which is exactly the number that moves a budget conversation.
- Cost of poor quality — find where the money leaks, then close it with controls your team runs.
- Audit readiness — FSSC 22000, BRCGS, IFS, customer and retailer audits.
- OEE and daily management — the routines that keep a gain after the project ends.
- Supplier and toller performance — scorecards, qualification, hands-on recovery.
- Crisis and recall — containment, root cause, communication, and the fix that stops the repeat.
- Interim leadership — plant startups, transitions, covering a quality or OpEx seat while you hire.
A COPQ / audit-readiness programme typically runs 6–12 weeks; interim and advisory work is a monthly retainer. Both are quoted after the deep dive.
Why there's a lab in this website
Everything I sell, I run. Sensors, edge, automations, dashboards, alerting, backups, identity — in a real house, every day, and shown live on a call. It's where the failure modes get found on my time instead of yours.
Kaizen Lab is the technical division of Zenilify Consulting.
Small improvements, measured. A home lab built in public: kaizen-lab.dev
I've been on the other side of the quotation.
I'm Erick Hernández Zenil. I started in R&D, moved into taking pilots to scale, then into CAPEX projects, and then into owning a plant P&L — which is where operational excellence stopped being a methodology to me and started being money. After that, EVP; and alongside all of it, the Lean years that gave the rest its grammar.
Engineering at TU München. Germany, then Switzerland, then Mexico. I work in German, English and Spanish, and the reason that matters isn't the languages — it's that I've sat in the HQ meeting where the standard is written and in the plant meeting where somebody has to make it work on a Tuesday. Those are two different rooms with two different definitions of "done", and a lot of projects die in the space between them.
Zenilify Consulting is the practice, and this site is its log — not a brochure. The Living Lab runs every day. The range, from a sensor on a compressor to a COPQ programme across a site, is genuinely the work: industrial analysis and research, industrial design, quality control, hardware and software design and development.
I'm based between Toluca and Mexico City, and I travel.
The group
Zenilify Consulting is the parent company. Each business unit has its own site and focus, with the same operating discipline behind it.
Zenilify Consulting
Operational excellence, quality and digital transformation for manufacturing and food.
zenilify-consulting.com Technical divisionKaizen Lab
Hardware, IoT, self-hosting and local AI, tested in a real lab and documented in public.
kaizen-lab.dev →International trade
Component sourcing and Mexico–Asia cooperation in technology and food, with quality control at origin.
Coming soonLet's find the money hiding in your operations data.
Thirty minutes, one plant, one honest read. No deck required.
Book the diagnostic call →