Operations Consulting from Shop Floor to Boardroom with Gabriel Rodrigues of FALCONI

Gabriel Rodrigues is a Partner at FALCONI, the largest management consulting firm in Brazil, now operating across North America. He moved from Brazil to Chicago in 2018 to build their U.S. practice from scratch and was recently named one of the Top 25 Supply Chain Consultants in the country. In this conversation, Gabriel breaks down what he sees when he walks into a manufacturing plant or warehouse, why most companies are not ready for the technology they are buying, and what industrial real estate operators need to understand about how their buildings affect tenant operations.

Key Takeaways

• Fix the process before you buy the tech. If your operations are chaotic, technology will only make that chaos more expensive.
• Automation is now a labor strategy, not a cost strategy. Companies are lowering ROI thresholds because the alternative is not having workers at all.
• Space optimization comes before network changes. Most companies have far more capacity in their existing facilities than they realize.
• The building is part of the talent strategy. Parking, security, lighting, and amenities directly affect whether workers show up. Landlords are sitting on a platform opportunity.
• Operational services like layout analysis, energy optimization, and data integration can be offered to tenants at scale.
• The real AI use cases in operations right now: predictive maintenance, machine vision, automated materials handling, and process control.
• Brazilian operational discipline, forged in a harder environment, is now being applied to American companies that never had to be that rigorous.

Chapters

• 02:15 - Growing up in Itajuba, Brazil and the path to engineering
• 06:30 - What is FALCONI and how it started
• 09:45 - Vicente Falconi, Toyota, and bringing TQC to Brazil
• 12:07 - "Changing the wheel while the car is running"
• 15:20 - How FALCONI embeds inside companies vs. traditional consulting
• 18:40 - The move to the United States and building the practice from zero
• 22:10 - What surprised him about American manufacturing
• 25:30 - PDCA methodology explained
• 28:45 - Change management on the shop floor
• 30:06 - "The definition of insanity" and noise propagation
• 33:31 - "Technology will only exacerbate your chaos"
• 35:22 - The ROI question most companies skip
• 38:46 - Automation for resilience, not savings
• 41:30 - How supply chain network design drives real estate decisions
• 44:46 - The parking lot story
• 47:15 - Space optimization before expansion
• 49:28 - Landlords as service providers
• 51:05 - Where to find Gabriel and FALCONI

Episode Resources

Connect with Gabriel Rodrigues — Partner | Director Operations practices - FALCONI US

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriel-alves-rodrigues-731a762b/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/falconi-us/

Connect with Justin Smith, SIOR - Lee & Associates Irvine

• https://smithcre.com/
• jbsmith@leeirvine.com
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbsmith/
• 949.400.4786