News & Downloads

Lean Fundamentals: The Problem with Problem Solving
Across various industries, there has been a consistent demand to improveproblem-solving skills within businesses. Organizations often prioritize theuse of problem-solving tools and approaches, considering probleminvestigation and resolution as critical aspects of regulatory compliance.However, the prevailing culture associated with compliance-drivenproblem solving often leads to shallow investigations, rushed resolutions,and recurring issues. Download The Problem with Problem Solving
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Pocket Guide to: Changeover Optimisation
Manufacturing organisations are under pressure to increase productivity and improve flexibility & responsiveness to customer needs. Changeover optimisation is a means of improving performance to create a more flexible manufacturing environment. Equipment flexibility & responsiveness are core requirements of all modern manufacturing thinking and largely determined by process changeover capability. To download click the download [...]
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Your IT department might be unknowingly undermining your culture

We all know humans are inherently lazy – we tend to take the path of least resistance. This makes sense; both mental and physical activity takes a lot of energy, something that was scarce at the time when we had to hunt and gather for our next meal. For a more recent example, if you […]

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Process Standardisation and Stabilisation

When embarking on an improvement journey, organisations too often give into temptation and jump directly to process improvement, either by designing a new, optimised, Lean process, or attempting to immediately create a digitised, automated version of their existing manual process.   While this approach of skipping ahead to your desired future state may seem like […]

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A Time To Celebrate
A Time to Celebrate   In May 2022 the SHINGO Institute recognized our team with a coveted SHINGO Publication Award for our book - TPM: A foundation of Operational Excellence.    The team behind the book, the authors Peter Willmott, Andy Brunskill, and John Quirke along with Alex Everitt our graphic designer,  were able to finally meet [...]
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Jeff Williams supports Fareshare on their journey to Enterprise Excellence
As part of our Care Programme, we provide both financial and in-kind support to charities around the world.  Jeff Williams, our Director of Business Development was delighted to spend a day with the team at one of our much-loved charities Fareshare to support them with business improvement and their journey to Enterprise Excellence.      [...]
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Celebrating Ideal Behaviours
Every July we recognize some of our amazing team for their contribution to the business.  This annual award is given each July and builds on our monthly reward and recognition program. Both of the programs are designed to recognize those individuals that go above and beyond in demonstrating our core values and the behaviours we [...]
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Celebrating Our New Doctor of Psychology – Bryan Cutliff
Congratulations to Bryan Cutliff, a pivotal member of our US Division who has recently been awarded his Doctor of Psychology in Leadership Psychology.  Bryan has brought a unique insight into leadership and the psychology of leading change to our team over recent years.  Having worked previously in executive leadership positions in healthcare in the US, [...]
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7 phases of Business Transformation
Every organisation will move through cycles of growth, change and at times decline.   To strive for success and Enterprise Excellence requires a focus on continuous improvement and the alignment of the organisations purpose, people, and processes. Employee Engagement & culture affect an organisations ability to realise its ideal results, by ensuring your transformation programme [...]
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Embracing Digital

In our recent webinar on the Future of Lean we explored the need for organisations to embrace digital solutions to enable them to deploy continuous improvement more efficiently. You can watch the webinar here.  It is clear that embracing technology will enable organisations to reduce costs, improve productivity and be more flexible. Our work with blue-chip organisations on developing improvement strategies and roadmaps incorporates the adoption of the right technologies to suit the demands of our […]

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Feeling Proud – S A Partners achieves Investors In People Gold Standard
We are delighted to announce that S A Partners has been awarded the Investors in People Gold standard. This prestigious award has been bestowed to recognize that S A Partners has achieved exceptional standards in leading, inspiring and empowering it’s team. We often use the term ‘Cobblers Children’ to remind ourselves we are a leading [...]
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Webinar: Lean Leadership – What’s my Role?
Building resilience will support both you and your teams steer a course during the upcoming weeks and months. The current situation has occurred rapidly and has had a significant impact on individuals, their families and the organisations in which they work. Phil Spooner will draw on his experience as one of our senior consultants and [...]
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S A Partners Gain Investors In People Recognition

We are pleased to announce that S A Partners have been awarded the Investors in People Core Standard and is thus recognised as an Investors in People organisation.

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Meeting the challenges and solving the Process Industry puzzle

The ‘process industry’ covers a wide range of ‘products’ where the primary production processes are either continuous or occur in batches which are processed. Examples of process industries include, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, ceramics, base metals, coal, plastics, rubber, textiles, tobacco, wood and wood products, paper food, beverages and paper products, etc. Quite a variety of […]

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Certified Shingo Training – Discover the Principles of Enterprise Excellence
The Shingo Model™ is not an additional Lean program or change initiative to implement. Rather, it introduces the 10 Shingo Guiding Principles on which to anchor your current initiatives. It fills the gaps in your efforts towards ideal results and enterprise excellence." We offer the full range of Shingo courses both online and in-house, and [...]
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TPM of a world class cyclist

Many of you will have seen the documentaries about Team Sky, following the record breaking Tour de France wins by Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome. Team Sky take a holistic and systemic approach to looking after their riders and the team

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CI Coaching for Leaders
Back in  November we ran our second CI Coaching for Leaders,training seminar in Auckland with Chris Butterworth. We are repeating this public course on the 27-28th February and also will be repeating later in the year (31 August and 01 September 2017) Chris explains why this course is an integral part of enabling leadership to be [...]
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Customer value is not the same as customer satisfaction
Customer value is not the same as customer satisfaction . Satisfaction looks at how we perform today against a range of criteria we have decided . Value, however looks forward and needs to seek understanding of what they value in the future. Too much reliance is placed on surveys that are fine for understanding satisfaction [...]
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How do you best develop coaching capabilities?
To view, use the download button. There is much debate about which style of coaching is better suited to what situation. Situational Leadership for example, proposes that managers be more directive where the competence and commitment of people is at their lowest or where situations require urgent action, but most would agree that having a [...]
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Would You Like to Learn Faster Than Your Opposition?

The Lean and Sustainable Consortium provides you the platform to learn faster than your opposition, and you can view the video to see how it provides your organisation that competitive edge.

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S A Partners Thought Leaders who Inspire & Motivate

Last month we highlighted Prof Peter Hines, S A Partners Chairman, who is a world renowned leader in his field, who delivers speeches at events around the world.

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Shingo European Summit

The Shingo Institute will be holding the Shingo European Summit in Cork, Ireland on October 13-14 this year and we are pleased to announce that our own Prof. Peter Hines will be one of the plenary speakers.

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New Lean and Green Qualification

The Master in Lean & Green Supply Chains of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) is a joint initiative of a UPM team, led by Prof. Joaquín Fuentes-Pila, and Dr. Keivan Zokaei

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Shingo Discover Excellence Feedback

‘A terrific experience’ and ‘an extremely informative 2 days’ are some of the feedback comments after the 2 day Shingo discover Excellence workshop which was held at Vale last week.

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My predictions for 2015

I start off writing these predictions for 2015 with more than a little apprehension. My first prediction last year would be that the resource crunch would shoot up the political agenda, but I, like every other observer, failed to predict the collapse in oil prices in the second half of 2014.

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Being World Class & Angry Frank the boss

Too often change programmes are copied from other organisations. People copy tools and use too much jargon. Shingo tells us to concentrate on the WHY and not the HOW. Build systems to help people fix the WHAT and then up-skill as appropriate with the right HOW’s at the right time.

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Deployment Goes on and on…

Deployment takes our strategy and pushes it down into the organisation so everyone knows what part they have to play in delivering strategy…..correct?

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Congratulations to the Winners of 2014 Food & Drink Awards

The Manufacturing Excellence Awards were held in London 20 Nov 2014 and was attended by Jeff Williams, Head of the Food & Drink Sector at S A Partners. Who were the winners?

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Lean and Green Podcast for the GEMBA Academy

listen to this great podcast by Keivan Zokaei on Lean and Green philosophy in the market place.

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Lean and Green Consortium Gathering Pace

After the initial launch of the proposed Lean and Green Consortium back in February, events are gathering pace with leading companies such as Nike, Mars, Adnams and Toyota to name but a few joining the group.

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Lean Leaders Power of Seven

A peer learning group for those leading lean strategy and implementation in an organisation.

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The Shingo Winners

We are pleased to announce that Professor Peter Hines and Keivan Zokaei attended the Shingo Institute for Operational Excellence annual conference in Sandusky, Ohio to be presented with the 2014 Shingo Research and Publication Award

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First European Shingo Workshop of 2014 is a Great Success

S A Partners completed its first European Shingo workshop of 2014 at the Shingo winning Vale refinery in Clydach, Swansea on Tuesday the 18th March, and the feedback was very positive.

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Shingo Prize Research Award goes to

We are delighted to announce that two of our team members Dr. Keivan Zokaei and Prof. Peter Hines have become the most recent recipients of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award per the recommendation of The Shingo Board of Examiners, for their latest publication “Creating a Lean and Green Business System: Techniques for Improving Profits and Sustainability” co-authored with Hunter Lovins and Andy Wood.

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