Who we work with
Mid-market and enterprise leadership teams with more good ideas than shared priorities.
The Forever Foundry Process™ is commissioned by operations, technology and transformation leaders who have to choose between competing digitalisation and AI investments, and need a ranking their peers will stand behind. This page sets out the size of organisation we work with, the functions that bring us in, the sectors we have delivered in, and where the method is not the right answer.
Organisation size
Mid-market and enterprise, from around 200 people up
Most engagements sit between 200 and 10,000 employees, in one site or many. That is the range where a priority list stops fitting in one person's head: enough functions to hold genuinely different views, enough spend at stake to make guessing expensive, and a leadership team small enough to get in one room for a day.
Larger enterprises commission the FOFO Process™ for a division, a region or a single value stream rather than the whole group, which is usually the right scope in any case. Smaller organisations and SMEs get value where the decision is genuinely contested and the investment is material: an ERP replacement, an automation programme, a first serious AI budget.
Size is not really the qualifier. The qualifier is whether the work crosses functions or sites, and whether any single function could settle the order on its own. If one could, you do not need a diagnostic.
The buyer
The functions that commission the work
The FOFO Process™ is bought by whoever is accountable for the decision, not by a procurement category. In practice that has been:
Operations
Chief operating officers, operations directors, group manufacturing and supply chain directors. Usually the function feeling the friction first, and the one with the strongest claim on what to fix.
Technology
CIOs, IT directors and heads of digital, typically holding a backlog that outruns the budget and a need to show the sequence was set by evidence rather than by whoever asked loudest.
Transformation
Transformation, change and programme leads who need a mandate that survives the next reorganisation, with the scoring record attached.
Chief executive and finance
Chief executives in owner-managed and private-equity-backed businesses commission it directly. Finance is generally in the room by the ranking stage, because that is where the sequence turns into a spend profile.
Where the commissioning function matters most is the question the diagnostic is written around. AI Compass™ is built bespoke each time, so an operations-led engagement and an IT-led one ask different things of the same organisation.
Sectors
Manufacturing and multi-site operations first, but the method is sector-neutral
Our early clients are concentrated in manufacturing and multi-site operations: food production, life sciences and automotive. Those are the environments where the cost of a wrong priority is visible on a line, and where the knowledge that should drive the decision sits with shift and site teams rather than at group level. Read the Park Cakes case study for a worked example.
Nothing in the method is specific to manufacturing. A diagnostic, a scoring framework and a decision workshop apply wherever a priority list is contested across functions. That includes logistics and distribution, retail and hospitality operations, professional and financial services, housing and facilities management, education groups, and public sector bodies with a digital mandate and a fixed envelope.
What travels is the constraint, not the industry: work spread across sites or functions, evidence held by the people doing it, and a leadership team that has to commit money in an order it can defend.
Qualification
Signals the FOFO Process™ will pay for itself
Two credible lists
Operations and IT each have a defensible priority list, and the lists do not match. Nothing is obviously wrong, so nothing moves.
A budget without an order
The investment is approved in principle but the sequence is not agreed, and every function believes it should go first.
An AI mandate and no map
Leadership has asked for an AI plan, and what exists is a list of tools rather than a list of decisions.
Decisions that keep reopening
The same priorities are relitigated each quarter because the reasoning behind the last ranking was never written down.
When it is not the right fit
A single team with one obvious answer does not need a diagnostic. Neither does a decision leadership has already made and funded, unless the point of the exercise is to test it. If you need delivery capacity rather than a decision, say so on the call and we will point you at the right part of our partner network instead.
We would rather decline the work than run a Compass whose findings you could have written in advance. That is set out in our principles and positions.
The three stages
What a fit-tested engagement looks like
01: AI Compass™
An organisation-wide diagnostic, written for your functions and sites, surfacing where to act from the people who know the business best.
02: Slid3rs™
Every opportunity scored on business value against delivery complexity, by your own people, producing one ranked list leadership can fund.
03: FlowRoom®
Business and technology leaders agree the ranking together, in one room, in one day, with the reasoning on the record.
Not sure you qualify