As sought-after practitioners of lean principles, NEXT LEVEL Partners,® LLC helps organizations strategize operational planning, achieve value creation, accelerate business performance, and drive continuous growth. With experts who hold over two decades of experience, the company implements its lean business system; a combination of strategy deployment and lean and growth tools.

The lean business system was initially designed for core manufacturing verticals, such as aerospace, chemicals, packaging, energy, and the medical devices sector. Realizing its potential to traverse beyond those domains, the company years ago began to transform clients across healthcare, finance, retail, hospitality, and other sectors with great success.

We Leave Clients With A New Culture And Self-Sufficiency To Be Successful Long After We Leave

“All industries today struggle to meet customers’ ever evolving needs and higher expectations and to produce more with less year by year. Our lean business system is proven to be successful in making large breakthroughs and systematic changes in organizations across any industry vertical and enabling significant double-digit changes in their operating performance,” says Ronica Bowen, Principal, NEXT LEVEL Partners.
NEXT LEVEL Partners designs value creation plans and provides management teams with a robust operating system and capabilities to address specific operating and commercial challenges. The company’s nationwide team of lean A-players is made up of practitioners who have run an average of about 500 Kaizen events each over the course of their careers in high-performance, high-expectation environments.

NEXT LEVEL Partners sets itself apart with its goal of ensuring client self-sufficiency. Its experts transfer their knowledge to client teams to ensure they can continue their Kaizen lean journey. NEXT LEVEL Partners also serves private equity firms in fostering improvements within the companies they invest in, and with the due diligence required to better understand those companies.

NEXT LEVEL Partners engages with clients via a methodology that begins with assessing their strategic direction and ensuring they have the management system in place that will achieve their vision. For clients without the necessary system, the company recommends its strategy deployment tool to ensure the management teams have a good vehicle to deliver a multi-year value creation plan. They then utilize value stream mapping to identify non-value-added activities that create waste, excess inventory, and defects. Accordingly, NEXT LEVEL Partners’ expert practitioners create a Kaizen roadmap that consists of either lean or growth tools to address the process, efficiency, and waste issues, and increase productivity and yield, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction. Going beyond facilitating Kaizen events, the company also focuses on cultural change, change management, and knowledge transfer.

“We leave clients with a new culture and self-sufficiency to be successful long after we leave,” says Bowen.

With this unique approach, NEXT LEVEL Partners delivers immense value for their clients. In one instance, the company helped a manufacturer of precision-engineered products accelerate EBITDA. The client had a new private equity owner who realized they had scope for improvement through operational enhancement, reducing lead times, and improving market share in key segments. The major issue was their delivery performance. They were looking to avoid capital expenditures by achieving more production from their existing line. With a series of lean and growth tools, NEXT LEVEL Partners addressed production challenges and lead time issues. By putting in place new processes to improve production and by training the organization on continuous improvement, the company helped them deliver more capacity with better lead times. As a result, the client regained a 5-percent market share.

The driving force behind these successes is NEXT LEVEL Partners’ founding principals, who were once senior leaders at Danaher Corporation. They founded the company 18 years ago with a vision to leverage their experience and their knowledge of lean transformation to help those clients reach the next level of business performance. The rest, as they say, is history, one that NEXT LEVEL Partners’ track record continues to script.