A Forbes-covered example of what “rapid impact” looks like on a real shop floor.
When demand outruns capacity, the default playbook is capital: more buildings, more equipment, more headcount. Bandit Industries — the employee-owned woodchipper and grinder manufacturer in Remus, Michigan — wanted to see how far they could go before reaching for that lever.
The setup
Bandit’s horizontal-grinder line, branded The Beast, is the company’s hottest product. By mid-2025 they had 47 units sold and were producing two per month. CEO Craig Davis set the bar at eight — without a major capital build-out.
What we found
The line had grown into the existing factory footprint over time, not been designed for it. When we mapped physical part flow and the start-to-finish assembly process, we surfaced the headline number:
On-site travel for all parts that go into a single Beast: 47 miles.
Bottlenecks in assembly, gaps between shifts, suppliers that could be doing more upstream, and standard work that didn’t yet exist.
What we did
We partnered Bandit personnel through process mapping, then helped them stand up a focused improvement team made entirely of factory-floor team members — no managers in the room. Axiom facilitated; the team owned the changes.
Over several months they re-laid out assembly, relocated critical phases of the build, sharpened cross-shift communication, moved selected welding steps to suppliers as turn-key parts, and rolled out standard work.
What changed
- Beast assembly throughput more than doubled (2/month → 4+/month)
- 6 miles of parts travel eliminated (12% reduction)
- Team estimates ~50% of identified improvements implemented so far
- Modeled run-rate with remaining changes plus staffing: ~115/year (~10/month) — past the original goal of 8
“I have never seen a company move so quickly before on changing the organization, lining up participants, and getting buy-in.” — Ryan Cahalane, Axiom CEO
Why it worked
Strong executive sponsorship from Davis. A team structure that put authority in the hands of the people closest to the work. And outside facilitation that pushed back on “we’ve always done it that way” without breaking the trust required to make change stick.
This story was covered by Forbes contributor Jim Vinoski on November 21, 2025.