Academy

At the S A Partners Academy, we’re dedicated to helping individuals at every level of your organisation to deliver continuous, sustainable improvement. Our Academy has at its heart our integrated change model – Enterprise Excellence, a Shingo Prize winning piece of thinking that ensures real, lasting change. Whether you are a Leader, a Manager, or a Team Member, our Academy is designed to unlock your full potential.

Enterprise Excellence

Tailored Learning to Meet Your Needs

We have developed 3 core offers focused on creating lasting value for your organisation:


Within each of these offers we have courses aimed a transferring skills to sustainably transform the way in which organisations deliver continuous improvement.

What sets our approach apart is that every training programme is vocational, with a clear focus on delivering measurable impact for your organisation. Certification isn’t just abut completing a course – it’s earned through real, verified results that show positive, sustainable change.

Lean Competency System Impact Award

Academy LCS Impact Award Badge 2025
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Sellafield Impact Award

Following extensive stakeholder engagement and collaboration with delivery partners S A Partners, the programme structure was established. It consists of an initial benchmarking visit, six days of classroom learning, and five executive coaching sessions. Each participant also completes a VoicePrint exercise, submits an improvement plan for their area aligned with the Sellafield Way, and develops a strategy to sustain the CI culture within their area over a 3-5 year period. Successful completion of the programme leads to LCS 2a accreditation.

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Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water Impact Award

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water partnered with S A Partners to create and deliver a bespoke leadership programme. The leadership development programme was ambitious, targeting Welsh Water’s leadership community. Of over 3,500 employees, 20% hold leadership roles. Recognising the logistical challenges of training all leaders within a single year, the programme aimed to train 150 leaders annually. By the beginning of 2025, more than 600 leaders across 56 cohorts had successfully attended the course.

Customised Solutions for Sustainable Results

Before you begin any Academy programme, we’ll work closely with you to define the essential outcomes that will positively impact your business. Whether you’re looking to enhance leadership skills, streamline processes, or drive cultural transformation, our customised approach ensures that every step we take is aligned with your strategic goals.

Transformation

A Comprehensive Approach to Improvement

Our Academy programmes are designed to work at all levels – organisational, system, process, and task. This ensures that leaders, managers, and frontline staff can work together toward shared goals and maximise their collective impact.

True transformation happens when all elements – strategy, people, and processes – are aligned and integrated. Together, we harness the power of improvement to create lasting change.

Enterprise Excellence

Enabling Transformation

We know that understanding what needs improvement and setting clear timelines are critical to your success. That’s why we ensure a thorough analysis of your desired outcomes before any training begins, whether it’s for an individual, a team or a multi-site transformation.

Using a range of diagnostic tools, including customer value assessments, surveys, and 360-degree Reviews, we develop a tailored roadmap to achieve your goals on time and within budget.

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The Shingo Prize
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The world's most recognized Lean Qualifications

By joining the community of certified Lean Competency System and Shingo Candidates, you become one of 750,000 people worldwide who have been through the programme – it is the worlds most recognized Lean Qualification.

Transform the way your organization operates by equipping leaders are all levels with the skills that enable sustainable continuous improvement to happen, whilst ensuring people possess the capability to solve problems and improve what they do. 

Our programmes are aimed at improving the 6C’s;

  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Cost Reduction
  • Compliance
  • Capability
  • Colleague Satisfaction
  • Capacity Optimization


It’s a balance between creating enabling capability and delivering tangible benefits for the orgnaisation.

Learn more about this through our case studies below, detailing more around how these benefits were delivered.

Case Studies

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Strategy Deployment at one of Europe's largest, branded Food Companies
Revenue:
Industry: Food and Drink, Manufacturing
Service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence
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Intercast & Forge
Supporting the Intercast & Forge 'New Ways of Working'
Revenue: AUS $ 69.82 million
Industry: Manufacturing, Process Industry
Service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence
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Cook Medical
Developing a Lean Academy at Cook Medical
Revenue: US$ 2.2 billion
Industry: Life, Science & Health
Service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence
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Mylan (now Viatris)
Achieving Operational Excellence through TPM at Mylan (now part of Viatris)
Revenue: US$ 15.43 Billion
Industry: Life, Science & Health, Manufacturing
Service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence, Shingo, Total Productive Manufacturing
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DSV A/S (Previously Panalpina)
Achieving the Shingo Prize at Panalpina
Revenue: £18.4 Billion
Industry: Aerospace & Defence, Retail & Distribution
Service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence, Shingo
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Inalfa Roof Systems
Roadmapping & Capability Building at Inalfa Roof Systems
Revenue: EUR 1.4 Billion
Industry: Manufacturing
Service: Business Transformation, Operational Excellence

"S A Partners have a tremendous combination of real-world experience, expert level content knowledge and seasoned facilitation skills. S A Partners were able to very successfully facilitate and guide an important group of global leaders through the 12-week leadership program with much success - their ability to navigate the various personality styles, varying degrees of continuous improvement backgrounds as well as their attention to detail in the course logistics led to a very successful learning experience."

Brent Carpenter, Cook Medical