A structured four-pillar diagnostic that mapped 80% of production volume, confirmed the bottleneck location, and quantified every material waste stream — delivering a prioritized improvement roadmap tied to real financial impact.
A growing North American packaging manufacturer suspected they were leaving significant money on the floor — but had no baseline data to confirm it, no agreed methodology to find it, and no prioritized roadmap to address it.
Management had intuition built from years on the plant floor. What they needed was a structured, data-anchored process to convert that intuition into verified numbers and a ranked list of where to act first.
Nextep was engaged to run a full Operations Excellence Assessment — four pillars, real plant data, financial output at the end.
The Nextep assessment methodology runs four simultaneous analytical pillars across the operation. Every finding is anchored to actual production records, machine logs, and verified throughput data — not observation alone.
We mapped 80% of production volume, confirmed the primary bottleneck location, and quantified waste streams from material loss, speed loss, downtime, and utilization gaps. Nothing estimated. Everything verified.
The assessment confirmed $247K in Q1 waste losses — extrapolated to a $988K+ annual waste elimination opportunity across material loss, speed loss, and utilization gaps. Every number tied to a specific finding from the plant data. The output was a ranked improvement roadmap with financial impact attached to each initiative — so leadership could decide where to deploy resources first.
The Operations Excellence Assessment delivers a prioritized roadmap — ranked by financial impact, sequenced by implementation complexity, and anchored to real plant data. It's not a slide deck about best practices. It's a ranked list of where your money is going and what it will take to stop it.
Organizations that complete the Assessment have two options: implement the roadmap on their own with their existing team, or engage Nextep to lead implementation. Either way, you leave knowing exactly where to go and why. No guesswork. No ambiguity.