The pattern in container glass
Container glass equipment is dominated by a handful of OEMs — Bucher Emhart Glass, Heye, XPAR Vision, Tiama, and a few others. Each has built consulting offerings adjacent to their equipment business: Production Support, GAP Analysis, Smart Plant, sensor-tied process audits. Independently, these are competent products run by competent people. Structurally, they are pipelines for the parent company's equipment.
That structural conflict matters even when individual consultants act in good faith. The findings will tend to point — not dishonestly, but consistently — toward solutions that involve the parent's products. A forming audit conducted by a sensor vendor will tend to find sensor gaps. A hot-end audit conducted by an IS machine builder will tend to find IS machine opportunities. The buyer's interests and the consultant's interests diverge slightly at every junction. Over a 100-finding audit, that small divergence compounds.
What vendor-neutral means in practice
Lean Glass has no equipment to sell. We don't take OEM commissions. We don't have referral arrangements with EPCs. We disclose any prior commercial relationship with any vendor or manufacturer in writing before quoting an engagement, and we walk away from any engagement where the disclosure creates a conflict the client isn't comfortable with. The disclosure is not a checkbox — it's a quote attachment.
Why this changes findings
Because we have nothing to sell after the audit, the audit itself is the product. Findings are ranked by EBITDA impact — not by what would be easiest to monetise downstream. A finding that says "fix this with operational discipline, no capex required" is a perfectly valid finding for us; for an OEM-tied consultancy, it is a finding that doesn't pay anything afterward.
What we still recommend OEMs for
When a finding genuinely needs equipment, we say so — and we make a vendor-neutral recommendation, naming the right OEM for the spec without prejudice. We have no incentive to over-prescribe equipment, and no incentive to under-prescribe it either. The OEMs we work alongside know this, and it makes the working relationship cleaner: they get clean specs, we get unbiased findings.
The disclosure standard
- Any commercial relationship with any vendor or OEM in the prior 24 months is disclosed in writing before quoting.
- Any finding that touches a vendor we have engaged with is annotated with that disclosure inline.
- Engagement contracts include a no-commission, no-referral, no-equipment-resale clause.
- Vendor RFPs we support are run on a level playing field — no incumbent advantage, no late-stage information sharing.
What the structural difference looks like in numbers
On a typical hot-end audit, our findings break down roughly as: 60–70% operational and behavioural (no capex), 20–30% process / standards (low capex, high impact), and 10–15% capex-required (lensed for ROI vs. plant alternatives). Vendor-tied audits — when we have seen them, with permission, on the same plants — tend to invert that ratio. The same plant. The same data. Different findings shaped by different incentives.
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