January 2010 - S A Partners launches Ireland business

S A Partners has announced a new business in Ireland (S A Partners Lean Consultancy Ltd).  We have been working for some time with Irish businesses including C&C Group – producers of Magners cider – which appointed S A Partners to help it not only to implement Lean principles, but also to develop a skilled internal resource that could sustain and build on the improvements made.

C&C’s IT & Continuous Improvement Director, Shane Hughes commented: “S A Partners has provided leadership and technical skills that have helped us to embrace and sustain a Lean approach to doing business. We work with them as strategic partners, not consultants, and this subtle difference is the key value they add to an organisation.”

Director of S A Partners Ireland, Chris Butterworth commented: “We have a distinctive offering that goes beyond our consulting expertise. S A Partners has access to the latest academic research on Lean and offers learning programmes that enable our clients to take ownership of their continuous improvement going forward. We hope that by establishing a local Irish business we can develop close relationships with our Irish clients.”

January 2010 - New alliances announced

S A Partners has extended its offering by forming new alliances with MA Consulting and the Leading Edge Group.

MA Consulting supports organisations to optimise business processes, unlock funding potential, open new markets and grow sales, implement change and solve people or operational issues.  This is delivered by a specialist team working through a unique ‘virtual’ business model.  The alliance between S A Partners and MA Consulting will see the two consultancies working together in particular to support struggling businesses back to a position of stability, profitability and growth.

The Leading Edge Group is a provider of flexible online Lean Thinking education and training programmes.  These enable organisations to support their implementation of a Lean philosophy, and to better ensure that benefits are sustained, by developing Lean skills at every level of their human resource.  Programmes are accredited by strategic partners including University College Cork, The Institute of Industrial Engineers (Ireland and US) and the Logistics Institute (Canada). 

Lean or Green - do we have to choose?

Staying Lean wins prestigious Shingo Prize

Staying Lean has been awarded a Shingo Prize for Research 2009.  The Shingo Research Prize recognises research regarding new knowledge and understanding of manufacturing and operational excellence.  The authors of Staying Lean are: Professor Peter Hines and Dr Pauline Found, Cardiff University and Gary Griffiths and Richard Harrison, Managing Consultants, S A Partners.

The book tells the story of how a multi-national organisation successfully implemented and sustained Lean to help turn its financial performance around. The story is based around the Lean Iceberg Model of sustainable change and addresses the often invisible, and hard to copy, enabling elements of successful Lean organisations: Strategy and Alignment, Leadership, Behaviour and Engagement as well as the more visible features: Process Management and the application of Lean Technology, Tools and Techniques.

The book is designed to be used as a practical workbook to guide practitioners along their own Lean journey so that Lean becomes embedded in the organisation and sustains performance improvements over the long term.

To read or download a low resolution pdf copy of the book, register on our website and access "Member Downloads" in the Resource Centre.  

We are running several workshops around this publication - for more information visit our events section.