About Highline Systems
A Canadian analytics and supply chain consultancy for companies that make and move physical things.
Why we exist
Analytics consulting is well supplied at the top of the market. A company with a thousand employees and a data team has plenty of options. A company with eighty, an ERP and a planner who keeps the real numbers in a spreadsheet has almost none that are priced for them.
That gap is not a lack of appetite. The operations managers we talk to know exactly which decisions they are making blind. What stops them is a market that offers either enterprise software priced for a much larger company, or a consulting engagement that ends with a report and no working tool.
Highline Systems exists for the middle: fixed-scope work that starts from the data a company already has, delivers something their team operates themselves, and is documented well enough that we could be replaced. We would rather be re-hired than depended on.
What we bring to the work
Highline Systems is built on more than a decade of combined experience in operations analytics and supply chain decision support — the kind done inside real businesses, against real constraints, not in a research setting.
Between us we have built and run the decision-making analytics behind inventories worth over $300 million: setting the stock targets, building the forecasts the purchasing decisions rested on, and carrying the consequences when a number was wrong. That scale matters less as a headline than as a filter. It means we have already met most of what a catalogue can do to a model — intermittent demand, suppliers who do not hold to their quoted lead times, item masters with three codes for the same part, and the seasonal pattern that turns out to be a single customer's ordering habit.
It also means we know which problems are not worth solving. A good deal of what we do is telling an operations manager that the thing they were about to buy would not have paid for itself, and naming the smaller thing that will.
How we work with you
-
Delivered by the people who scoped it
There is no handover to a junior team after the sales conversation, because there is no sales team. The person who assesses your data is the person who builds against it.
-
Operations first, analytics second
We start from the decision that is difficult, not from the technique we would like to use. The method is chosen to fit the problem and the data, and we show you the comparison that led us there.
-
Built to be handed over
Code, documentation and infrastructure sit under your accounts and are yours at the end. We would rather be re-hired than depended on.
Common questions
Where are you based?
Calgary, Alberta and Toronto, Ontario, working with clients across Canada. Engagements run remotely end to end.
How big is the team?
Small and deliberately so. Every engagement is delivered by the people who scoped it. You will not be handed to a junior team after the sales conversation, because there is not one.
Why are there no client logos on this site?
Because we have not asked permission to publish them, and we do not publish what we cannot attribute. We are happy to arrange a reference conversation instead, which tells you more than a logo does.
What does “over $300 million in inventory” actually mean?
It is the combined value of the inventories whose planning and decision analytics we have been responsible for across our careers, not a figure for any single client and not a measure of savings delivered. We cite it because it is the honest answer to “have you seen a catalogue this size before” — not as a result.
Find out what your data can already tell you
A free 30-minute data readiness assessment. We look at what you have, tell you what it can support today, and name the first thing worth building. No preparation needed.