Wood chipper manufacturer Bandit Industries gives a boost to the making of ‘The Beast’

When you sell a self-driving giant of a wood chipper that eats whole trees for breakfast, and there are long-neglected forests full of dead wood across North America that need to be cleared, demand skyrockets. That can be a blessing And a curse, like Bandit Industries, Inc. in the small town of Remus, right in the heart of Michigan. But thanks to a focused team effort, supported by external experts, the company was able to dramatically increase the throughput speed of their most popular machines.

Bandit makes wood chippers, tree stump grinders and horizontal grinders. They are doing a healthy business with their standard trailed chippers, which you have probably already seen in your city. After all, there are always branches and trees that need to be discarded, and chipping makes the transportation and subsequent use of the wood much more efficient, creating both mulch and fuel.

The ESOP company employs 550 people and has annual revenues of approximately $250 million.

Bandit’s biggest current opportunity and challenge lies in its horizontal grinder line, collectively branded as The Beast. These are powerful, heavy-duty chippers designed for huge volumes and extreme terrain, and the demand for them is enormous.

“We sold 47 units,” Bandit CEO Craig Davis told me when I visited there last summer. “But we now only make two machines per month. We have to increase that to eight per month.”

With that goal in mind, and a desire to reduce the capital investments required to substantially increase throughput, Bandit engaged the consulting firm. Axiom production systemswhich focuses on optimizing and streamlining operations while improving efficiency and eliminating waste.

Axiom immediately worked with Bandit personnel to map out the processes, tracking both the physical flows of parts through the factory and the work process details for the entire machine assembly from start to finish. The group was immediately able to identify several areas of inefficiency and bottlenecks. One of the largest, resulting from the addition of this newer product model to the numerous existing assembly and storage buildings on the factory site, was a total of on-site travel for all the parts required to make a single unit. 47 miles.

Axiom leaders then worked with Bandit to assemble an ad hoc focused improvement group of 16 cross-functional team members on the factory floor to further clarify production bottlenecks and inefficiencies and identify solutions. The team then quickly moved to troubleshooting.

“The speed at which this team has developed is impressive,” Ryan Cahalane, founder and CEO of Axiom, said in an interview. “I have never seen a company move so quickly in changing the organization, lining up participants and getting buy-in.”

“This is truly a rare opportunity to do something special,” said Patrick Gaughan, COO of Axiom.

Over several months of work, the team identified numerous improvements to optimize production flow and eliminate inefficiencies, including new layouts for assembly operations, better organization of assembly areas, relocation of critical assembly stages, methods to improve team communication, optimized supply chain and materials management, and the introduction of standard work instructions.

“It was nice to see people who weren’t on the team trying to understand what we were doing,” Jack Cooper, business improvement manager and one of Bandit’s leaders of the effort, told me during one of my factory visits. “The changes we are making here lay the foundation for subsequent implementations for future improvements.”

The members of the targeted improvement team and support staff were unanimously optimistic about their performance:

• “Turn-key parts offered a great opportunity, for example by having a supplier carry out a welding step instead of doing it in-house.” – Kunwar Gaurav Pratap Singh, Supply Chain Engineer
• “We have learned a lot about how to protect people and the company.” – Brian Bloomquist, engineer and technical writer
• “It was a real opportunity to bring standardization to the operation and make it more repeatable.” – David Hegenauer, quality engineer
• “The demand is there because we are the best in the world. We cannot forget why we are here: to deliver for our customers.” – Ed Caspar, commercial plant manager
• “We have always offered exactly what the customer wants, but we have to balance that with standardization.” – Will Smith, technical manager

A unique aspect of the focused improvement team is that there were no directly involved managers, which raised some questions early on, but ultimately yielded results.

“I was a little skeptical about the no-management concept beforehand,” product manager Kyle Kimbell told me during my last visit. But that prompted a number of guys to join the team, which they probably wouldn’t have otherwise.”

The results speak for themselves. The organizational changes that the team has now implemented alone have more than doubled throughput in machine assembly, from an average of two machines per month to more than four. The 10 kilometer route of parts has already been eliminated, a reduction of 12%. And the team estimates that they have achieved only 50% of their expected improvements, with the rest to follow as they complete their planned changes.

With all the planned improvements and the recommended additional staffing levels, the team expects production can be further increased to 115 per year, or almost ten per month, well exceeding the original target of eight.

The group’s rapid successes were no surprise to Davis. “The people here work very hard and are very proud of what they do,” he told me. “We intend for their efforts to be the poster child for the entire company.”