Our Purpose

John was born in South Africa. He graduated with Engineering degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and spent 12 years in industry and local government in South Africa in the areas of project and design engineering, management services, operations research, and operations management. One of his jobs was Chief Solid Waste Engineer, where he was line manager for 1200 people and 400 vehicles. At current prices, the annual budget controlled by this post was over £30m. John began learning about Lean in 1982 with Toyota in South Africa. In 1987 he came with his British wife and three boys to live in England and took up a position as Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the University of Buckingham. He became a Reader in 1990 and was Dean in 1992. His interests are in lean operations, both in service and manufacturing. Becoming ‘lean’, he believes, should be a priority for all operations-led organisations. John is the author of several best-selling books including The Lean Toolbox (sales exceeding 100k). He has developed several participative games in Lean and in Service, including The Buckingham Lean Game which is used in many organisations, universities, and consultancies in several countries. He is the founding Director of MSc in Lean Operations, Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC), 1999-2012. During his period at LERC he supervised over 80 Masters dissertations. He has been a Shingo examiner. In 2013 he joined the APICS CPIM ECO certification committee. On the Buckingham University MSc Lean Enterprise website, a continually updated list of ‘Bicheno’s 100 Top Books on Lean’ is maintained. This site attracts several hundred hits every month. He has been a mentor to numerous organisations He is a regular participant on programmes at University of Witwatersrand, Vlerick School of Management, Swansea University, The Manufacturing Institute, Antwerp School of Management, PLAN (Sweden), and Effektivitet (Denmark).

Sarah is the Director of Executive Education at Cardiff University.

Her role is to work with external organisations, to understand their learning needs and to then design programmes of learning which employ the academic expertise of the Business School.

Sarah joined the Health and Services Team in the Lean Enterprise Research Centre in 2005. Since that time, she has worked on numerous lean projects in hospitals, universities and public and private services. She specialises in helping to develop the knowledge of continuous improvement teams and have worked with the Ministry of Justice's Lean Academy, their Shared Service Centre in Newport, the Value for Money team in the Home Office, Legal and General, Principality Building Society and Nestles to ensure that organisations approach lean in a holistic, sustainable way.

Her passion is to explore the interconnection of lean concepts and tools, helping people to understand how all of the lean ideas, support and inform each other, to bring about the pursuit of organisational perfection.

Maneesh is an active member of ASQ and EUROMA. He co-chaired the 21st Quality Management & Organisational Development Conference hosted in Cardiff University in August 2018. He has also initiated a first practice based forum on Lean Green and Innovation (iLEGO) that brings practitioner community together to have engaged discussion on synergies and misalignments between the three topics and promote cross learning between different industries. He has been involved in delivering LSS training up to Black Belt level and delivered several workshops on LSS application in different type and size of industries including Kwik-Fit Insurance Services, Standard Life, Admiral, Principality, Bakkavor Group, Norbert Dentressangle, Norgine Ltd., Celsa Steel, NHS Grampian, NHS Sheltand, Edinburgh City Council, Aberdeenshire Council, Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India (ACMA) and Tata Motors. He is also a regular speaker at International Conferences and Seminars on LSS & Process Excellence.

Pauline was a Senior Research Fellow at LERC for 9 years and was involved in a range of research, knowledge transfer, engagement and executive education projects and initiatives, as well as writing books and papers on Lean. She is co-author of Staying Lean: Thriving not just surviving for which she holds a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize (2009). Pauline previously worked for Imperial Tobacco and BP, in a range of research, project planning and senior management roles, including IT, purchasing, operations planning, HR and quality. Before she joined LERC she was Factory Services Manager at Imperial Tobacco and managed the support services for factories in the UK, Ireland and Netherlands. She was educated at The Open University, Cardiff University and Bristol University. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Operations Management (FIOM) and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (MCIPS) and the American Society of Quality (ASQ). She holds a PhD, MBA, BSc (Hons), BA and PG Diploma in environmental management. She was President of the International POMS (Production and Operations Management Society) College of Behavior 2009-2011.

Tammi spent 10 years as an engineer with BAE Systems, and Ocular Sciences as a Production Cell Leader before returning to an academic role in 2003. She spent 10 years at Portsmouth Business School, where she led the MSc Leadership in Health and Wellbeing, before joining Winchester Business School. Tammi is a practitioner and researcher in systems thinking, visual leadership, operational excellence and lean six sigma, working with a variety of organisations in the public and private sectors to improve performance. She has delivered invited keynotes at various conferences on Lean in Higher Education and the public sector. The Improvement Community of Practice (co-led with Nigel Ward) is a thriving community meeting up to 7 times a year to explore and develop innovative ways of improving performance. Tammi incorporates a multi-disciplined approach to learning, teaching, knowledge transfer and administration. Her approach stems from a grounding and interest in systems thinking and high performance methodologies to bring about sustainable improvement. She has co-led and built up an improvement community of practice for practitioners over a number of years, in order to engage and work with Project Managers and Improvement Professionals to embed theory into practice and explore the knowledge landscape in this area. She has been involved in Knowledge Transfer Projects funded by the Technology Strategy Board.

Nick is a socio-technical systems researcher, meaning he has an interest in how people and technology work together to generate high performance organisations and highly reliable organisations. Nick is a renowned academic, a polymath, and his interests cover healthcare systems reliability and high performance manufacturing and service operations.

His career started at Cardiff and his work was some of the most influential in terms of the development and dissemination of lean systems (Lean Enterprise Research Centre). He was trained in Japan by the Toyota Motor Corporation and holds one of the Elite IIES Toyota Fellowships. Working with his mentor Professor Dan Jones, Nick expanded his research into food retailing and production (Tesco, Unilever) and manufacturing. During this time he accumulated over £4mn of EPSRC funding and an Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (£3,5mn to study nanotechnology and lean business systems). Nick’s interest in lean socio-technical systems and his passion for robust engineering maintenance (TPM) has won him many awards and accolades (innovation Prizes, and Shingo Examiner status). He took time out of the university system to work on a turnaround of a cosmetics company and having achieved that goal he returned to academia. Luck led Nick to the NHS when an anaesthetist called one day and asked if Nick’s engineering and human factors knowledge could be applied to surgery and theatres for patient flow. World healthcare research now dominates 70% of his research and almost 100% of his PhD students.

Whilst at Warwick Medical School, under Professor Mathew Cooke, Nick developed more of his human factors interests whilst funded by The Health Foundation to research safer clinical systems. This opened up pathways of socio-technical systems to explore. In 2011-12, Nick went to The Royal Mint to be the Chief Engineer of the 2012 Olympic medals.

At Swansea, he is part of the management team with responsibility for enterprise and innovation.

Professor Francis joined Cardiff School of Management in 2012 and is Director of the Value Flow Centre (VFC) and Professor of Management at the school. Prior to this he worked as a Senior Research Associate at the world-renown Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC) at Cardiff Business School, before taking a Readership at Newport Business School. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Studies and an MBA and PhD from Cardiff University. His research interests include contemporary operations and management paradigms (COMPs) – particularly Lean Thinking and the Theory of Constraints; the conception of 'value'; creating and sustaining 'flow' within private and public sector processes; and organisational innovation and problem solving.​

Mark has authored over 100 research publications and has been awarded over £1.8 million as a Principal Investigator (PI) during his academic career. Following ten years working in the IT industry in a variety of roles spanning software development, systems implementation and application consultancy, Mark joined LERC in 1996. During his 13 years there he designed and implemented numerous large applied research projects with firms such as Tesco, Bass, Unipart, BT, Sainsbury's, Whitbread (Beefeater), Kuwait Petroleum and The Royal Mint.

He founded the Food Process Innovation Unit (FPIU) within LERC and acted as its Director of Research for three years. He then spent one year on secondment to the EPSRC funded Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (CUIMRC) to head the 'Process' theme of its flagship sustainable change (SUCCESS) programme. Other notable projects during his time at LERC included a successful NPD process improvement project with ASDA and six of its leading private-label suppliers (SANPD) and involvement the innovative Cardiff Lean University (LU) project.

His last role before leaving LERC was as Principal Investigator and project manager on a collaborative research project (PREMADE) involving Cardiff University, Queens University Belfast and Bombardier Aerospace Belfast; a large civil aircraft manufacturing firm. This was a three year, £250K TSB (DTI) funded project that subsequently won the Bombardier Aerospace Group's Worldwide Process Improvement Project of the Year (2009) Award. After joining Newport, Mark completed projects with British Airways Avionics Engineering and Torfaen County Borough Council, before acting as the Newport Project Leader in a £27m multi-institutional ERDF funded project called ASTUTE.