Situation
BTi Logistics is a leading Australian-owned freight forwarding and 3PL company, offering a comprehensive suite of services including import/export sea and air freight, customs brokerage, warehousing and fulfilment, and end-to-end supply chain management.
Founded in 1988, it operates across Australia, Singapore and New Zealand. The company’s head office and national distribution centre are located in Ravenhall, Victoria, where staff manage customer service, freight forwarding, warehousing, management, and administration.
BTi has been on a growth trajectory, with a new distribution centre in Brisbane and a new Sydney facility. Its diverse customer base includes automotive, chemical, packaging, and industrial clients, and the company prides itself on flexible, customer-centric solutions.
Recognising that this expansion represented both an opportunity and a risk, BTi engaged OE Partners to help strengthen its operational foundations and prepare the business for scalable, profitable growth
Challenge
While growth was strong, Coolpac’s leadership team — owners Andrew Gibson and Lyn Radnell — recognised that their own time and energy were increasingly absorbed by day-to-day operational firefighting. This left less time for strategic work such as developing new customers, designing innovative products, and exploring new markets.
To scale effectively and profitably, Coolpac needed to build a business that could “run itself” — one where processes were robust, staff were capable and empowered, and performance was managed systematically rather than through constant director oversight.
Their business objectives were clear:
- Enable Growth through Lean Processes and Capable Staff: The company’s success had been driven largely by the hands-on effort of its directors. To unlock future growth, Coolpac needed strong processes and a team equipped to manage them independently.
- Improve Profitability: While the company was healthy and customers were willing to pay for quality, there were opportunities to reduce material wastage, stabilise production, and eliminate hidden costs caused by process inefficiencies.
Specific operational challenges included:
- Inconsistent production output: Moulding process output fluctuated by ±15%, leaving capacity underutilised and limiting throughput.
- Limited visual management: While some tracking existed for productivity, quality and delivery performance were not consistently measured. Systemic analysis of root causes when targets were missed, wasn’t as consistent as the owners wanted, leading to recurring issues.
- Product variation and waste: Inconsistent process control led to unnecessary bake time, material waste, and variation in finished goods quality.
People development: Coolpac wanted to build Lean process improvement capability within its workforce — particularly in production management — to create a common language for problem solving and align with the Lean Six Sigma expectations of its global pharmaceutical customers.
Action
Coolpac partnered with OE Partners to design and implement a program that would build internal capability, stabilise production, and free up leadership to focus on growth.
The engagement followed a structured Lean transformation process:
1. Current and Future State Design
OE Partners began with end-to-end value stream mapping, capturing the current process flows and identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and sources of waste. This exercise highlighted opportunities to rebalance workloads, reduce variation, and improve operator utilisation.
A future state value stream map was developed with Coolpac’s frontline leaders, creating a shared vision of how production could operate at higher efficiency and stability.
2. Time and Motion Study
OE Partners worked alongside Coolpac’s production team to conduct detailed time and motion studies, creating hard data on cycle times and operator activities. This revealed significant opportunities to synchronise mould start times, reduce idle periods, and rebalance work across operators.
3. Visual Performance Management
A visual management system was established in the production area, tracking key metrics including productivity, quality, and delivery performance. These boards created daily visibility of targets, performance gaps, and priority issues — enabling frontline teams to manage their own performance in real time.
4. Process Improvements
Several targeted process changes were implemented:
- Operator utilisation: Adjusted mould process start timing to optimise operator workloads, reducing downtime and boosting throughput.
- Flow efficiency: Introduced single-piece flow to improve efficiency and reduce work-in-progress inventory.
- Cycle time reduction: Shortened unnecessary bake times, reducing energy use and cycle time variation.
- Unpack time optimisation: Streamlined unpacking processes to further boost line efficiency.
5. Capability Building
To ensure sustainability, OE Partners provided Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training for key staff, equipping them with tools for root cause analysis, process improvement, and data-driven decision-making. This investment created a common language for improvement and laid the foundation for ongoing CI efforts.
Results
Coolpac saw measurable impact within just 45 days:
- Output increased by 17.5% on a key production line — representing an additional $300,000 per year in revenue capacity without additional capital investment.
- Variation reduced by 60%, leading to more stable quality, predictable cycle times, and improved delivery reliability.
- Visual performance management gave the team daily control over their operations, empowering them to identify and resolve issues quickly.
- Leadership capacity freed up, allowing directors to focus more on growth-oriented initiatives and less on day-to-day firefighting.
Crucially, the program not only delivered a strong short-term result but also built the internal capability needed for long-term improvement. Coolpac’s production manager and key staff gained hands-on experience in Lean problem solving and performance management, creating a sustainable model for growth.
Client Perspective
Andrew Gibson, Coolpac’s owner, praised OE Partners’ approach:
“I would recommend OE Partners because of their extensive experience, they’ve got a great perspective on how things can happen. We’re learning more about a whole lot of skillsets, and they contributed to that learning.”
This sentiment reflects the dual success of the project: delivering a significant uplift in output and profitability, while simultaneously developing the team’s ability to sustain improvement into the future.
Conclusion
Coolpac’s engagement with OE Partners illustrates the power of aligning leadership vision, robust process improvement methods, and capability building. In less than two months, the business achieved a major uplift in production capacity, reduced variation, and created the management systems needed to sustain performance.
Most importantly, the program positioned Coolpac’s leadership team to focus on strategic growth and innovation — ensuring the company can capture the next wave of opportunities with confidence.
