From 47 Miles of Parts Travel to More Than Double the Throughput

Bandit Industries is a 550-person, employee-owned manufacturer in Remus, Michigan, with roughly $250M in annual sales. Their core business — towed woodchippers, stump grinders, and horizontal grinders — has been steady for years.

The current opportunity sits in their horizontal-grinder line, branded The Beast: a self-propelled, heavy-duty machine designed for high-volume throughput in extreme terrain. As long-neglected forests across North America need clearing, demand for The Beast has skyrocketed.

By summer 2025, Bandit’s order book showed 47 Beast units sold. CEO Craig Davis had a clear ask: lift production from two machines per month to eight, and do it without a major capital build-out.

The Beast is a newer product on a factory site that already housed multiple legacy assembly and storage buildings. The line had been bolted on, not designed in.

When Axiom’s team did the first walk and mapped both physical part flow and the start-to-finish assembly process, they found the obvious bottlenecks — and one number that stood out:

Total on-site travel for all parts going into a single Beast: 47 miles.

Layered on top: assembly areas without standard work, communication gaps between shifts, supplier touchpoints that could be moved upstream, and an organizational hesitancy to challenge how the line had always run.

Axiom partnered Bandit personnel through process mapping, then helped stand up something Bandit hadn’t tried before: a focused improvement team made up entirely of factory-floor team members, with no managers in the room.

The team — supported by Axiom’s leaders — moved through diagnosis to problem-solving fast. Over several months, they implemented:

• New layouts for assembly operations
• Better organization of assembly areas and relocation of critical assembly phases
• Improved team communications across shifts
• Optimized supply chain and material management — including pushing select welding steps upstream to suppliers as turn-key parts
• Standard work instructions across the assembly process

Results so far:

• Beast assembly throughput more than doubled, from ~2 machines/month to >4
• 6 miles of parts travel eliminated (a 12% reduction against the 47-mile baseline)
• The team estimates they have realized roughly 50% of identified improvements
• With remaining changes plus recommended staffing, modeled output reaches ~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, Founding Partner & CEO, Axiom

The structural choice that made it work: putting the people who do the work in charge of redesigning the work, with executive air cover from Davis and outside facilitation from Axiom. The improvements aren’t a one-shot — they’re the new operating rhythm Bandit will run for the next phase of growth.