Why are we selling more without making more?

Revenue and volume are growing, but the expected improvement in profitability is not following them. The financial statements show where margin ended up, while operational metrics explain pieces of what happened along the way.

The Hard Case is finding where the expected margin actually disappeared.

Pricing, product mix, yield, scrap, rework, labor, capacity, warranty, and other factors may each explain part of the variance. The larger loss can emerge from how those factors interact across the operation rather than from any single obvious source.

This Hard Case follows a margin problem through ruwbi's six-step method to determine where value was actually being lost.