RESULTS
Results from real floors.
Three engagements, told straight: what we found, what we did, and what changed.
CUSTOM WHEELCHAIRS · NPL HOME MEDICAL
Getting the house in order before the move
NPL Home Medical, a custom wheelchair manufacturer, was preparing to move into a new facility, and leadership knew a new building wouldn’t fix old habits. Before the move, Leanwrx worked alongside the team to clean up processes, clear out excess physical inventory and the mental clutter that came with it, and build production around best practices. NPL walked into its new building with organized workflows and habits built to last, instead of carrying the old problems with them.
From one cramped station to three assembly cells, one of them mobile, built out before the move.
“Before we moved, Nik helped us clean up our processes, our inventory, and honestly our heads. We built production around best practices and walked into the new building with habits we could sustain.”
What we found
- Assemblers swapping hex bits all day because suppliers used different bolt heads
- Holes measured by hand on every chair
- The same order data keyed into the case system and several spreadsheets, then double-checked
- Service requests arriving by phone, text, email and hallway conversation
What we did
- Operations and service diagnostics with current- and future-state maps
- 5S and visual management in manufacturing and service
- Lean training for the team
- Warehouse optimization
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
NPL has tripled in size.
Along the way it made the Weatherhead 100 and Crain’s Fast 50, and in 2026 it was named one of Crain’s Best Places to Work in Ohio and a Cleveland.com Top Workplace for the sixth year in a row. When people ask David for the secret, he gives them five things. Lean is one of them, and that’s the honest version of this story: lean didn’t build NPL. It helped NPL execute.
HOW DAVID EXPLAINS IT
- 1Culture first
Documented the core values they wanted, held everyone to them, and hired for fit.
- 2A focused strategy
Picked one customer segment, long-term care facilities, and expanded geographically without leaving the playbook.
- 3“The NPL Way”
Documented processes for everything, borrowed from Toyota, backed by software they built for their own HIPAA-compliant workflow.
- 4A plan that invests ahead of demand
An annual operating plan that hired and trained people before the work arrived.
- 5Consistent execution
“This is where Lean and Six Sigma thinking came into play,” to cut waste and variability.
FURNITURE RETAIL · $75MM · CLEVELAND
Warehouse and inventory, across three facilities
A referral that started as one project and grew into lean training at three facilities plus warehouse and inventory work.
better inventory turns.
What we found
- Over $500K of inventory 90+ days old, some of it more than five years
- 23% of items on one outbound load weren’t where the system said
- Items picked for orders already cancelled
- Leads waiting to log in because every system seat was in use
What we did
- Warehouse 5S and rack re-slotting by usage
- Visual status board for inbound and outbound trucks
- Standard work for loading and unloading
- Lean training across three facilities
PHILIPS HEALTHCARE · MRI & IMAGING SYSTEMS · THREE U.S. SITES
Order management, from paper chase to flow
Waste isn’t only on the shop floor. At the Philips division that builds MRI and other large imaging systems, it was in the office, between a customer order and the plant.
a year in savings, on track year over year.
What we found
- Hand-offs and re-keying between sites
- Orders waiting in queues for review
What we did
- Mapped the order-management process across three sites
- Removed duplicate steps and waits
BEFORE LEANWRX
Twenty years of doing this, in very different places.
- PolyOne: ran an award-winning global Lean Six Sigma program with a $5MM annual budget; led 10 Kaizen events.
- KeyBank: used Design for Six Sigma to build a small-business resource center that grew segment revenue by $5MM; cut customer attrition by more than 20%.
Want a story like these? It starts with twenty minutes.
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