Professor Peter Hines held the chair in supply chain management at Cardiff University’s Lean Enterprise Research Centre until 2010 and is the chairman of SA Partners as well as an adjunct professor in Lean Enterprise at the University of South Australia. He followed a successful career in the distribution and manufacturing industry before joining Cardiff Business School in 1992, and his work on extending the boundaries of Lean thinking has received international, widespread attention. He has written or co-written more than fifty books and papers, including Going Lean (2000) and Lean Profit Potential (2002). He is an editorial adviser for five journals, including the International Journal of Logistics: Research and Applications which he started and is a skilled Lean mentor and coach, especially within multi-site operations, strategy deployment, and supplychain management.

Dr Pauline Found is a Fellow of the Institute of Operations Management and holds a diploma in Environmental Management, B.A., B.Sc., MBA, and Ph.D. She is employed as a senior research associate at Cardiff University. Pauline was a researcher on the SUCCESS program at Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC) that conducted the research into sustainability of Lean implementations. Prior to joining Cardiff University in 2004, Pauline had a successful career in industry for fifteen years, working for major UK FTSE 100 organizations, gaining management experience in purchasing, operations planning, quality, and human resource management. In addition to co-authoring Staying Lean: Thriving Not Just Surviving, she has published several papers on Lean and organizational change, and has presented the findings at major international conferences and industrial workshops. In 2009 she was elected to serve as president of the College of Behavior in Operations Management, a college of the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), an international professional organization representing the interests of POM professionals from around the world.

Gary Griffiths has an industrial engineering background with more than twenty years of hands-on experience in continuous improvement and Lean thinking. Combining practice with research throughout his career, he graduated to the master’s degree level in 2000 from the University of Wales. Gary has been with SA Partners since 2003 and has proven credibility in designing multi-site, integrated continuous improvement programs for a range of corporate clients (Gary was, in fact, the Lean program manager for the Cogent work). Having successfully applied the practices and principles of Lean in order creation, order fulfillment, and innovation business processes, Gary has worked in a range of business sectors, including FMCG, engineering, health and automotive, and has covered every continent in the world in doing so. Gary is head of capability development at SA Partners and specializes in Lean diagnostics and implementation, Lean maturity roadmap design, equipment effectiveness, and Lean leadership. Gary currently teaches Lean leadership at the University of South Australia.

Richard Harrison joined the Mars confectionery group straight out of school and, following completion of a business degree and a two-year post-graduate sponsorship at the London Business School, gained broad experience working at the board level in sales and marketing roles with premium branded products across a range of different industries. Richard joined SA Partners in 2002 with the assignment to take Lean off the shop floor and apply the philosophy within the sales and marketing environment. He is currently a managing consultant and a specialist in customer value and sales performance improvement and brings a wealth of practical experience to clients from across a wide variety of global market sectors and industries, including consumer products, retail, engineering, manufacturing, food, packaging, software, aerospace, automotive, medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, finance, the public sector, and legal. Within SA Partners he heads up the product group development for customer value and sales. Richard is a Master Practitioner in NLP.