About Us
180 OPEX helps manufacturers improve quality, productivity, safety, and reliability by identifying the operational issues holding performance back and building systems that sustain improvement.
Our approach grew out of more than 15 years of hands-on manufacturing and operational improvement experience - and a quality program that reduced deviations by 66% without adding headcount.
MacKenzie "Mac" Davis
Co-Founder
Mac spent more than 15 years leading maintenance and operational improvement in manufacturing, where he experienced firsthand the challenges of recurring downtime, quality issues, safety incidents, and constant firefighting.
While working to turn around struggling operations, he became increasingly interested in a simple question: Why do organizations keep solving the same problems? That pursuit led him to develop the operational system that became 180 OPEX - a methodology designed to capture organizational knowledge, reinforce standards, and help manufacturers improve execution long after the consultant is gone.
Today, Mac helps manufacturers build organizations that become stronger every time they solve a problem.
Meet The Founders
Matthew Lyon
Co-Founder
Before co-founding 180 OPEX, Matt built and optimized complex systems as a product manager in the mobile gaming industry, where success depends on understanding human behavior, analyzing data, and designing systems that consistently improve performance. He is also a licensed attorney and certified mediator.
At 180 OPEX, Matt leads business development and helps manufacturers connect operational challenges with practical, data-driven solutions. His background in analytics, system design, and communication complements 180 OPEX's operational expertise and supports the company's mission of helping manufacturers build organizations that execute consistently.
Our Story
180 OPEX didn’t start with a business plan. It was inspired by a question from a quality manager.
It was July, and we were set to miss our quality target for the year. The quality manager wanted to know if I had any ideas that could help. I wasn’t sure that I did, but I wanted to try.
I'd just read The Power of Habit, and I was enamored with the idea of using habits to improve process. So I built a method around a series of short, scheduled interactions designed to reinforce standards, train, and build better habits in the team.
One quality inspector. One scheduled set of interactions. One hour a day. No more, no less.
Instead of inspecting for failure, we used each interaction to discuss standards. When someone got one wrong, we retrained on the spot and documented it.
The results were immediate. In the first month, quality deviations decreased by 66%.
When I asked the quality inspector how the extra workload was hitting him, he told me they'd saved so much time not chasing rework and deviations that it had actually made his job easier.
We expanded the process to other departments without increasing the workload.
Productivity went up, safety issues fell off, and quality improvements held. While we were focused on the details, output doubled.
That's when I realized I hadn't built a quality program. I had discovered a better way for organizations to execute.
That realization became 180 OPEX.
Everything we build at 180 OPEX comes back to the same idea we discovered during that first quality project:
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Organizations already have standards.
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Lasting improvement comes from reinforcing those standards consistently.
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Systems - not reminders - create sustainable execution.
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When execution improves, quality, safety, and productivity improve with it.