Operational Excellence · Contract & Consulting Portfolio
Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement · Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
I walk an operation, find where the real value is and how to sequence it, then drive the change hands-on so it holds after I leave. Method-agnostic Lean across very different environments — the outsider's eye is the asset.
About
This portfolio translates a career spent inside operations — most of it employed by the companies I served — for independent work. That dynamic is in the open. But read the record for what it is: my entire continuous-improvement career was consulting. A regional CI leader owns no sites and commands no one. Working for the same company, or outranking the person running the DC, never bought automatic buy-in or support. Every engagement had to be earned — a sponsor won, a charter agreed with the business, a floor's trust built face to face, results validated by Finance, and a handoff that left the site stronger without me.
I've run that cycle across dozens of sites in four countries — the U.S., Canada, China, and Thailand — on very different floors. Independence changes the contract, not the work. The Field Notes below show the range.
Selected Work
Some of these prove results; others prove range and judgment. Click a card to jump to the full case.
16 sites · national continuous-improvement system
Rolled a common improvement operating system into 16 distribution centers, developed the root-cause tool adopted nationally, and owned a region that cleared its full-year savings goal in nine months.
East region + Canada · 2016–2019
Owned continuous improvement for the East region — distribution, Cardinal Canada, and segment businesses — inside a governance system where benefits counted only when Finance validated them.
Distribution center (Peabody, MA) · self-identified turnaround
Saw a step-change no one had asked for, retired underperforming automation in favor of Lean flow, and turned a bottom-quartile site into a #2 performer — with the gains holding.
Greenfield DC · via a healthcare advisory firm · 2023–24
Engaged B2B to lead the operations workstream of a health system's self-distribution build — a greenfield DC and integrated operations center serving 15 hospitals — coordinating architecture, automation/racking/MHE vendors, and internal functions inside the client's plan.
Working With Me
The same pattern sits behind every case on this page. It's the pattern I bring to a client.
The financials, the customers, the associates, and every major process mapped with its pain points — structured discovery on the floor, across every shift, prepped in advance so on-site time counts.
Findings are weighed by benefit and effort — with the site's team in the room — and become a prioritized pipeline: sponsors named, baselines set, sequenced by value.
Run the events, coach the daily rhythm, work actions to done — with the people who own the process, on the floor where the answers are.
Follow-up on a cadence until the operation runs it alone, with results measured against baseline until the goal is proven — then step away.
Case Study 01 · Continuous Improvement at Scale
At UNFI I rolled a common improvement operating system into 16 distribution centers, developed the root-cause problem-solving program adopted across the network, and owned a regional savings portfolio that cleared its full-year target in nine months. The design principle throughout: build systems the sites could run without me.
The Philosophy
A fix I own is a fix that leaves when I do. A system the team owns stays. That distinction shaped everything I built at UNFI: not a string of one-off wins, but a common way of seeing, solving, and sustaining that a distribution center could keep running long after I'd moved to the next one.
The measure of the work isn't what I fixed. It's what the sites could fix after I was gone.
Sustainment, not the kickoff, is the jobThe System
I built the improvement system in layers — each one earning the right to introduce the next. Standard rhythm first, then structured problem-solving, then the events that drive step-change.
The daily heartbeat — a floor that can see its own performance and act on it before problems reach the customer.
Root-cause problem-solving that turns "we hit the number" into "why — and how do we make sure it never comes back?"
The structured events that drive step-change — run on a disciplined cadence and validated with Finance, not self-graded.
The Engine
The events that drove the region’s results weren’t loose workshops. Each ran the same disciplined arc: three weeks of preparation, a four-to-five-day event, and ninety days of follow-through. The goal of the week itself is to leave with the vast majority of actions completed — not assigned.
The Deployment Model
Standing a system up is easy. Making it stick is the job. So every Lean Daily Management rollout followed the same high-touch cadence, engineered to move ownership from me to the site.
A full week on the floor to train the team and set up the visual management and daily rhythm.
Two weeks coaching the daily huddles live — so the rhythm becomes muscle memory, not a slide.
Weekly follow-up — indefinitely — until the site owned the system and needed me for none of it.
And it didn't stop at the site. Every period — a month, in UNFI's calendar — every site in my region came together to review progress against the six standard Lean Daily Management KPIs, spanning safety, quality, delivery, and cost: what was working well, and where they needed help. Part report-out, part networking session — the sites learned from each other, not just from me. That's what turned sixteen separate rollouts into one improving network.
The Method, Proven
Most people stop when the number is green. I pushed to look deeper — and made the site's warehouse damage the training problem for the RCA 2.0 workshop itself, so the associates weren't watching a method, they were running one. They found the root cause themselves: in a tight space, it was simply faster to scrap product than to rework it. So we fixed the space — 5S, the right tools, proper storage — and gave rework a fighting chance.
Controllable damage fell by more than half — and it held, because the team owned the answer. I didn't hand them a fix. I handed them a way to find their own.
The Portfolio
Beyond the tools, I owned my region's improvement plan — a funnel of finance-validated kaizen events tracked against a hard annual target. We didn't just hit it; we cleared the full-year goal with a quarter still to go.
My owned regional plan · plan vs. actual (months)
The full-year goal cleared in nine months — a quarter to spare, across ~11 finance-validated events.
Controllable damage, indexed (before = 100)
Cut by more than half · sustained by the team that found it.
Confidentiality: Internal site names, personnel, and financials are abstracted — and because this work falls within a fiscal year that was still open at the time of writing, dollar figures are withheld and results are stated in relative terms. Goal attainment and benefits ran through Finance validation, and Stephen Simard's tenure ran through May 2026. RCA 2.0 was developed by Stephen Simard; Lean Daily Management is an established methodology he implemented and rolled out across 16 sites within UNFI.
↑ Back to overviewSpotlight · Independent Consulting
A multi-hospital health system committed to its biggest supply-chain step: self-distribution. The plan was a greenfield distribution center and integrated operations center under one roof — med-surg distribution serving 15 hospital locations, a food-service commissary, sterile processing, an infusion center, and an outpatient pharmacy. A healthcare advisory firm brought me in to lead the operations workstream.
The Work
I owned med-surg distribution and the commissary, but the work ran across every workstream — layout and workflow decisions touched all five functions, because warehouse storage was shared space: supplies and finished goods from any workstream could land in it. That meant coordinating the architecture firm, the automation, racking, and MHE vendors, and the client’s internal functions — committing realistic timelines inside the client-led master plan and executing to them.
Space design and process flows — owned for my workstreams, coordinated across all five.
Storage design and build-out for shared and dedicated space.
Specifying and procuring the equipment the operation would run on.
Delivery network planning to 15 hospital sites.
Current-state assessment, recommended staffing models, and hours of operation.
Understanding each hospital’s delivery-timing needs and designing to them.
The Ending
After the health system merged with another system, the strategic calculus changed and the self-distribution project was cancelled. That decision was made far above any workstream — no operating plan survives a merger it wasn’t designed for.
I keep this engagement in the portfolio because it proves the thing a client actually buys from a contractor: how the work is run while the outcome is still uncertain. Current state documented, layouts and staffing models delivered, timelines committed and met, vendors and internal teams coordinated inside someone else’s plan — up to the day the decision landed. You don’t control client strategy. You control the state of the work when it changes.
Notes: The advisory firm and health system are not named in this document out of respect for the client relationship; I’m glad to share both in conversation. Engagement ran 2023–2024, contracted B2B (1099) through Mill Village LLC. No financial results are claimed for this engagement; the project was cancelled pre-opening following the client’s merger.
↑ Back to overviewCase Study 02 · Enterprise Continuous Improvement
Cardinal Health ran continuous improvement as an enterprise program with regional owners. I owned the East: every distribution center in the region, Cardinal Canada’s Dorval, QC operation, and any segment business in the region that needed the work. The program ran on hard governance — chartered projects, stage-gate tollgates, benefits that counted only when Finance validated them. My region realized and booked $38M; $21M of it was hard savings.
The Governance
Every project began as a charter. Every charter moved through stage-gate tollgates in Instantis — the pre-Oracle standalone system — and no benefit reached the books until Finance validated it. Closed projects stayed under measurement for twelve months, so a “win” that faded was a win that came off the record. Accountability sat at the portfolio level: not every project delivers, but the portfolio must.
U.S. East region results, 2016–2019 ($M)
$21M hard savings + $17M Type 2 = $38M total — all validated through the tollgate process.
Space required for outbound staging
Reduced by almost 40% — the direct result of one-truck flow.
The Mindset Shift
Distribution measured productivity and cost. It did not measure how long work took to move through the building — at the onset, no system even captured process cycle time. I lobbied to change that, and once the metric had support it was built into Tableau.
The operating idea behind it: one-truck flow. Work a series of trucks — inbound and outbound — through completion before opening new work, so teams flow to whatever the process needs in the moment instead of building queues between handoffs. Over-production fell, staging shrank, and dock space opened up in both directions.
Cycle time became a key process metric for distribution, with every site in the network measured against it. The most notable win in my region came at the Baltimore DC, where outbound staging space needs fell by almost 40%.
The Operating Model
The program’s deployment engine was the Cardinal Health operating model: a six-month engagement per site, opened by a structured two-week discovery to find where the value was, and measured by a lean maturity assessment — the Lean Roadmap to Success (LRTS) — that told the truth about whether the site was actually changing. The China deployment in the Field Notes ran this playbook end to end.
Three weighted lenses
A third of a site’s maturity score is people — measured by structured interviews on the floor, not a survey.
Design choices that kept LRTS from being an opinion
Early in my career I was part of the pilot launch and the development of the operating model itself — work guided by McKinsey. Since then I’ve deployed it from both sides: as the CI leader bringing it into other sites — leading the discovery in China, supporting the one in Thailand — and as a site director receiving it into my own operation. I know what it takes to run a deployment, and what it feels like to be on the other end of one.
Sources & notes: Benefit figures ($38M realized and booked; $21M hard, $17M Type 2) are U.S. East region results from the portfolio Stephen Simard owned as Regional Director, Operational Excellence, validated through the Instantis tollgate process described above. Type 2 refers to soft / cost-avoidance savings. The site turnaround in the next chapter predates this program (FY2010–FY2013) and its results are counted separately — no double-counting. Discovery and LRTS structure are drawn from original program materials; site names and site-level scores are withheld. Portfolio scale detail (sites, projects per year) to be added.
↑ Back to overviewCase Study 03 · Turnaround
I inherited an operation that was struggling — retrofitted more times than anyone could count, dated automation, processes bolted together over years into a tangle that didn't talk to each other. We set out to fix one dying conveyor. It turned into a rebuild that cut operating cost ~15% while sales grew 9% — and taught me that your best work can show up on the dashboard as a decline.
The Forcing Function
The catalyst, as it usually is, was a failure. Our conveyor was old and couldn't stay running — and being forced to look at it surfaced something we'd stopped seeing, because the conveyor had made it feel normal. Our highest-volume selection zone sat right next to the shipping dock, exactly where it should be. But QC was at the back of that zone, farthest from the dock — so completed orders climbed onto the conveyor and rode it all the way around the building before arriving at a dock that had been a few feet away the whole time. The A-frame told the same story from the opposite corner: maintenance-hungry, parked as far from the dock as the building allowed.
The conveyor wasn't just unreliable. It was enforcing a layout that fought the building — and it had normalized that fight so thoroughly we'd stopped noticing. So the easy answer, repair it, was the wrong one.
"If this system is the thing dividing us — what happens if we design the operation without it?"
The question that turned a repair into a three-year rebuildThe Rebuild
We set out to fix one failing system; each change we made exposed the next. It was a lot of hard work and a lot of small failures along the way — but the key moves tell the story.
Removed them entirely — and with them, the layout they'd been enforcing.
Brought elevated selection areas down to ground level.
Decommissioned it and folded its product into a single manual pick path.
Moved receiving to a mobile setup on a shared dock, freeing space to bring product down.
Reorganized order batches around departure times and balanced work across the floor.
Put performance boards where everyone could read the entire operation in one spot.
The Results
What we ended up with was a genuinely consistent operation. In the workbook record, cost per line fell ~20% — the unit economics behind the $3.36M (~15%) reduction — while volume climbed nearly 10% and controllable damage was cut by almost three-quarters.
Invoice lines shipped per fiscal year (millions)
+9.9% over the rebuild — sales up ~9% in the same window.
Total operating cost per invoice line shipped ($)
−20% unit cost — the money behind the ~15% / $3.36M.
Outbound lines per hour by fiscal year
More manual work meant productivity took a hit first — then the pick-path fix pushed it past where the automation had us.
Average controllable damage spend per operating day ($)
$9.1K/day → $2.5K/day.
The Twist
Productivity — lines per hour — was the metric. On the dashboard, in the operations review, tied to people's bonuses. More manual work meant that number took a hit, at least at first. So the most successful thing I had ever built was showing up, on the one number everyone watched, as a loss. And the comparison wasn't even fair: the old number had been propped up by the constant daily firefighting we were now designing out — a good-looking number that cost us to hold, and the metric could never show that.
The decline wasn't permanent — but climbing back took problem-solving, not patience. Moving the A-frame volume into the manual path caused congestion: too many pickers stacked into the same space, waiting on each other. Our own slotting system made it worse — built to minimize travel, it concentrated the fast product, which concentrated the people. So we did the counterintuitive thing and lengthened the pick path, spreading volume evenly. More walking, far less waiting. Wait time, not travel, had been the constraint all along. Once we stopped optimizing for the wrong one, productivity didn't just recover — it passed where we'd been with the automation.
The scoreboard lags the game. Organizations that can't see the lag will kill good work for looking bad on a metric that quietly stopped being the right one.
The lesson I carry into every operationWhat I Take From It
We couldn't have mapped the end state at the start, and we didn't try. Removing the conveyor is what made the mezzanine move solvable; reworking the pick path is what exposed the slotting problem. The value isn't only in the fix in front of you — it's in the problems that fix makes visible. Waiting until you can map it all is how organizations never start.
You built your KPIs to measure the old operation. Change the operation and some of your best results land where the dashboard doesn't look, while some wins show up as losses on lines that no longer mean what they used to. The discipline is to hold two things at once: respect the metric enough to know why people trust it, and ask honestly whether it still measures what matters — even when bonuses ride on the answer.
One thing made the call easier to sell: both the conveyor and the A-frame were nearly fully depreciated, so there was little book value left to write off. The small remaining balance was retired in FY2011 — a visible one-time bump on the cost line, kept in the record here rather than scrubbed — and small enough that the organization could actually stomach the decision.
Workbook Detail
| Fiscal year | Invoice lines | Cost / line | Outbound LPH | Damage $/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2010 | 12.21M | $1.76 | 70.2 | $9,070 |
| FY2011 | 12.44M | $1.79 | 71.8 | $6,510 |
| FY2012 · rebuild trough | 12.51M | $1.67 | 68.2 | $5,731 |
| FY2013 | 13.42M | $1.41 | 78.8 | $2,520 |
Sources: Cost-per-line, volume, outbound line-rate, and damage figures are drawn from the site's "Ops Weekly Stats" workbook (Monthly Totals, FY2010–FY2013). Cost reduction (~$3.36M / ~15%), sales growth (~9%), and network ranking are operational results from Stephen Simard's record — the ranking corroborated publicly by a direct report: “As a Director of Operations, he had moved our DC in rankings to one of the best in the network” (W. Myszko, LinkedIn, 2019); the narrative is drawn from his essay "We Cut Operating Costs 15%. The Metric Everyone Watched Said We Were Failing." FY2013 is partial in the workbook; the FY2011 cost line includes the one-time automation write-off described above.
↑ Back to overviewRange
Not every engagement gets a chapter. Where I have numbers, I've shown them; where I don't, I won't invent them.
Deployed the Cardinal Health operating model in China through a structured site-discovery process: the financial baseline (VOB), commercial and customer feedback (VOC), associate interviews (VOE), and a full mapping of every major process with pain points captured (VOP). Two weeks on the ground, much of the work done in advance.
The output wasn't a report — it was a 12-month project pipeline that started the site's improvement journey, with an in-country peer trained to coach the kaizen work forward. Heavy on supply chain, with back-office customs workstreams alongside.
Supported a peer's engagement at a surgical glove plant — mapping processes, identifying pain points, and helping the team assimilate everything they'd surfaced into a plan they could actually work.
The supporting role is its own discipline: the goal was their plan, not mine.
An acquired business built RFID cabinets for physician-preference items through a third-party manufacturer — and the build was being whipsawed by an inaccurate demand signal. We worked upstream: improving the quality and frequency of the demand signal so the manufacturer could actually plan capacity.
No before/after number I'd stand behind; the win was capability.
Approach
The answers are on the floor, with the people doing the work — so I engage them, not around them. I set projects up to succeed with alignment, sponsorship, clear objectives, and measurement, then follow through to realized, sustained results. I'm comfortable operating in an early, undefined situation — finding where the value is before committing to the plan is precisely the work.
The person who does the work leaves a gap when they go. I'd rather leave a team that's better at the work than I am — that's the version that compounds after the engagement ends. Everything I build is designed to be handed off; the handoff is the deliverable.
"Hitting the number" is where most operations stop looking — and it's exactly where the real waste hides. My job is to look under the hood anyway: to ask whether a green metric is masking a process that's quietly paying to stay green.
Methods & Tools
References
Excerpts from public LinkedIn recommendations — full text on my profile. Dates shown as written.
“He remains one of the most effective Lean leaders I’ve partnered with… He guides teams through the Kaizen and Problem-Solving cycle with clarity, purpose, and a deep respect for the people doing the work.”
“As a Director of Operations, he had moved our DC in rankings to one of the best in the network… he has been my boss, partner, and mentor.”
“Steve is an authentic leader who has the uncanny ability to motivate his team, develop others around him and drive value for the business… and deliver outstanding results for the organization.”
“Steve mentored me through my journey for Black Belt certification… Steve has shown me the value of culture change and together we have been able to create sustainable processes that have significantly improved challenged facilities.”
Point of View
The distribution-center rebuild, told from the inside — and what it taught me about the gap between what's working and what your KPIs can see. Read the essay →
Why buying equipment is not an operating strategy — and what to build instead. The thinking behind the automation decision in the turnaround. Read the essay →
Where to Start
You don't need a defined project to start a conversation. Most of the work on this page began with a leader who only knew something was off — a plateaued site, a green metric that cost too much to hold, more capacity on paper than the floor ever delivered.
Finding that gap is the strength I've built a career on: walk the operation, diagnose where the real value sits, and turn it into a prioritized pipeline of work worth doing — sponsors named, baselines set, sequenced by value. That's the first deliverable of any engagement, and it stands on its own even if the rest of the work goes to someone else.