The 'Inspiring Success: Good to Great' programme (part funded by the Welsh Assembly Government and delivered by S A Partners) was designed for small and medium sized enterprises within Wales' 'Objective 1' development areas.

The aim was to improve the competititiveness and survival rate of SMEs by implementing best practice process and leadership techniques to generate high impact business improvements.  The programme helped to focus management teams on what their customers valued and how they could structure their processes to deliver this value and consequently safeguard and strengthen their order books.

The assisted SMEs exceeded the targeted increase in turnover during the programme and created more jobs than expected.  Click here to read the full case study.

Should have gone to S A Partners - and they did!  Specsavers asked for help to improve the workflow for their Corporate Tax team.  We worked with the team to remove waste from the process - the results included an improvement in the number of files they could process each day from 10 to 16 and a reduction in lead time from 50 days to 16 days.

This case is a prime example of how Lean tools and techniques, pioneered in manufacturing, can also be used to great benefit in service or back office functions.  Click here to read the full case study.

Roland is the world's top name in musical instruments. The next time you go to a gig, the artist you see is highly likely to be using Roland keyboards, drums or another product from their highly innovative range. Roland products have been used by top artists including Take That, Kaiser Chiefs, Jamie Cullum, Hard-Fi and Pharrell Williams.

Using the first principle of Lean Thinking, S A Partners helped the Roland UK team to get true insight into what their customers value. "We have high standards of customer satisfaction but didn't really know if we were meeting our customer wants." said Tim Walter, Chief Operating Officer of Roland UK, the sales and distribution arm of the Roland Corporation. Click here to find out more about the customer value project and the resulting benefits.

Being challenged to cut costs by 30% certainly focuses the mind. Instead of rushing down the traditional route and lashing out at the easiest and most obvious targets, such as labour costs, Boots Contract Manufacturing (manufacturer of products including Clearasil, Soltan and No 7 Cosmetics) took the time to analyse properly the waste in its processes and to restructure to deliver real improvement over the longer term. Click here to read the case study.