Peter Hines and S A Partners
I established S A Partners in 1993 whilst still active in the Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC) at Cardiff University. My role as Director of LERC had enabled me to network with many highly influential figures in the burgeoning lean community of the time and to participate in a number of highly innovative and leading-edge research programmes. However, academic conventions and the bureaucracy characteristic of a University environment shackled my ability to deeply understand application at a very fundamental, ‘grass-roots’ practitioner level.
Improvement is experiential – to understand it you have to experience it. The S A Partners consultancy business enabled me to ‘go native’ and explore and understand lean practice in detail and in depth. It continues to do so to this day.