Woodchipper Producer Bandit Industries Supercharges Making ‘The Beast’

When you’re selling a self-propelled giant of a woodchipper that eats whole trees for breakfast, and there are entire long-neglected forests full of deadwood across North America that need to be cleaned up, demand skyrockets. That can be a blessing and a curse, as Bandit Industries, Inc. in the small town of Remus, right in the heart of Michigan, has discovered. But with a focused team effort supported by outside experts, the company was able to dramatically increase throughputs of their most popular machines.

Bandit makes woodchippers, stump grinders, and horizontal grinders. They do a healthy business with their standard towed chipper models, the ones you’ve probably seen around your town. After all, there are always branches and trees that need to be disposed of, and chipping makes transport and subsequent use of the wood much more efficient, creating both mulch and fuel.

The ESOP company employs 550 people and has annual sales of about $250 million.

Bandit’s biggest current opportunity and challenge is in its horizontal grinder line, collectively branded as The Beast. These are high-powered, heavy-duty chippers designed for massive volume throughput and extreme terrain, and demand for them is through the roof.

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

With that goal in mind, and with a desire to limit the capital investment required to substantially increase its throughput, Bandit engaged the consulting firm Axiom Manufacturing Systems, which focuses on optimizing and streamlining operations while improving efficiencies and eliminating waste.

Axiom immediately partnered Bandit personnel for process mapping, tracking both physical flows of parts through the plant as well as work process details for the entire start-to-finish machine assembly. The group was able to immediately identify several areas of inefficiencies and bottlenecks. One of the biggest, owing to the addition of this newer product model to the factory site’s numerous existing assembly and storage buildings, was a grand total of on-site travel for all parts that go into making a single unit of 47 miles.

Axiom’s leaders then worked with Bandit to assemble an ad hoc focused improvement group of 16 cross-functional factory floor team members to tackle further clarifying the production bottlenecks and inefficiencies and identifying solutions. The team then quickly progressed to problem-solving.

“The speed that this team has moved at is impressive,” Ryan Cahalane, founding partner and CEO at Axiom, told me in an interview. “I have never seen a company move so quickly before on changing the organization, lining up participants, and getting buy-in.”

“This is a really rare opportunity to do something special,” added Axiom’s COO Patrick Gaughan.

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 phases of assembly, methods to improve team communications, optimized supply chain and material management, and introduction of standard work instructions.

“It was nice to see people not on the team trying to understand what we were doing,” Jack Cooper, business improvement manager and one of Bandit’s leaders of the efforts, told me during one of my plant visits. “The changes we’re making here are laying the groundwork for subsequent implementations for future improvements.”

Focused improvement team members and supporting personnel were unanimously bullish about their accomplishments:

• “Turn-key parts were a big opportunity—for example, having a supplier execute a welding step rather than doing it in-house.” – Kunwar Gaurav Pratap Singh, supply chain engineer
• “We 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’re the best in the world. We can’t forget why we’re here: to deliver for our customers.” – Ed Caspar, commercial plant manager
• “We’ve always offered just what the customer wants, but we have to balance that with standardization.” – Will Smith, engineering manager

A unique aspect of the focused improvement team is that it had no managers directly involved, which raised some questions early on but delivered in the end.

“I was a bit skeptical up front about the no management concept,” product manager Kyle Kimbell told me during my last visit. “But that got some guys to engage with the team who probably wouldn’t have otherwise.”

The results speak for themselves. With just the organizational changes the team has now implemented, throughput on machine assembly has more than doubled, increasing from an average of two machines per month to over four. Six miles of parts travel has already been eliminated, a reduction of 12%. And the team estimates that they’ve only realized 50% of their expected improvements, with the rest to follow as they complete their planned changes.

With all planned improvements along with recommended additional staffing, the team anticipates that output can be further increased to 115 per year, or nearly ten per month, pushing well past the initial goal of eight.

The group’s quick successes were no surprise to Davis. “The people here work very hard and take a lot of pride in what they do,” he told me. “We plan for their efforts to be the poster child for the whole company.”