Our research
PDF: Business Improvement – the ‘new normal’
From mining in remote Western Australia, to serving a retail customer or processing a banking transaction in metropolitan centres, business improvement is crucial to every organisation’s growth and survival. Coxswain Alliance has worked with in-house Business Improvement teams across various industries, and discovered that the challenges they face and the causal factors are common across all sectors and industries. View 3-page pdf.
PDF: Adopting Lean and Six Sigma – for operational excellence in Services
Why are manufacturing techniques like Lean and Six Sigma improvement methodologies gaining attention, but struggling to be adopted in the Services Sector? Coxswain Alliance takes a look at how these fundamentally sound methodologies are relevant to any industry. The key is to be able to internalise the core messages and experiences of those who have spent decades developing and refining these techniques and be able to interpret them into your own environment. View 6-page pdf.
PDF: Change Management in a governance and risk management framework
The breadth and duration of effort required for effective change management is often underestimated resulting in a less than successful implementation program. While introducing change into an organisation can be highly challenging, Peter Braithwaite, principal of Coxswain Alliance, contends that good leadership provides the key to more successful outcomes. Download interview (6:29 - 5.9MB mp3). View 6-page pdf.
PDF: What can Australia do about its great productivity challenge?
The Grattan Institute’s Saul Eslake and Marcus Walsh research, Australia’s Productivity Challenge, examines Australia’s current position with relation to productivity gains, examining what has driven them over the last twenty years but more importantly, what risks face us as a nation going forward. We have taken one assertion in the paper and examined it from our perspective of having worked at a site level across most industries in Australia. We provide our views on what Australian business can do NOW to address the looming productivity threat. View 4-page pdf.Article: Adopting Lean and Six Sigma improvement methodologies
Globally, organisations from many industries, including the Services sector are adopting a ‘Lean Six Sigma’ strategy. This is particularly true of organisations that previously focused on Six Sigma. General Electric, one of the pioneers of Six Sigma, is now incorporating a Lean Six Sigma approach to achieving rapid transformational change at lower cost. More ...Article: Lean Principles
Lean principles have been enhanced and developed by Toyota to create the Toyota Production System. Toyota developed Lean in the 1950s based on the work of Frederick Taylor and W. Edwards Deming, both industrial engineers. Toyota does not refer to the term ‘Lean’, this was coined by Womack in ‘The Machine that Changed the World’. Toyota uses the term – Toyota Production System. More ...Article: Six Sigma Principles
Six Sigma is a process improvement methodology developed at Motorola in the 1980’s to reduce defects in its processes. Its goal was to achieve a level of performance equal to a defect rate of 3.4 defects per million opportunities – this is a virtually defect free environment i.e. Six Sigma performance. More ...Article: Comparison of Lean and Six Sigma
Lean and Six Sigma are process-based improvement methodologies: both were developed in manufacturing environments, both have proven their effectiveness. Current emerging trends are indicating that integrating the best elements of both methodologies offers a better option. More ...Article: Case study: The Toyota recall – has Lean failed?
The faults related to the recall of vehicles are dramatic, but more a reflection of a global supply chain and a manufacturing business of huge scale. There is nothing new about this issue in cars from many manufacturers, but the sheer size of Toyota and the global spread make it a significant event. More ...Glossary: Terms, definitions and references
For an explanation of terms related to Lean and Six Sigma, please click here.top
