Samantha Allen has extensive experience in a variety of industries within both the public and private sectors.

She has led the design and implementation of effective Lean programs in both the UK and SA, that ensure institutionalization of process improvement and Organizational change. Samantha has a passion for training and skills development and holds a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and is a Prince 2 Project Practitioner.

Norman is the founder of the Lean Institute Africa, a Lean Executive Coach and formerly a Professor of Business Administration at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town. He was among the first researchers in South Africa to introduce innovative manufacturing and supply chain improvement concepts such as lean manufacturing, into the country. In recent years he has focused on implementation of lean management in the South African public health system although his experience spans across the mining, manufacturing and service sectors. He teaches on executive programmes at UCT and elsewhere. He continues to research the area of process improvement, with particular attention to large-scale systems.

Anton is a Lean Executive Coach and a member of the Management team. He has helped organisations to implement and institutionalise operational performance improvement programmes in industry, commerce and the public sector justice and healthcare systems for many years.

He has taught operations management at South African universities since 1993. Recently he has taught at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town and as a visiting professor on the MBA programme at Shanghai University. His PhD research was on the effective implementation of shop-floor improvement teams. He has also written a textbook “Introduction to Operations Management” published by Heinemann in 2010.

Tshepo Thobejane has implemented Lean Thinking and Practice to achieve operational improvement through the use of process improvement methods throughout his career as an Industrial Engineer.

He has work in a diverse range of industry sectors includes – manufacturing, management consulting, logistics, supply chain, banking and public healthcare. He is convinced that Lean Thinking can be a lifestyle and is applicable absolutely everywhere.

Melika is a Lean Coach at the Lean Institute Africa. Having originally qualified as a Registered Nurse, she went on to complete a Masters of Public Health and developed a keen interest in the implementation and management of systems, that ensure efficient and effective service delivery for the end user. She has been actively involved in the implementation of lean practices and principles across multiple industries including healthcare, manufacturing and agricultural sectors, and has been instrumental in leading the site support for the National Vaccination Roll Out in the Western Cape.

Founder and Advisor of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) Inc. The LEI is a nonprofit training, publishing, conference, and management research company chartered in August 1997 to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based initially on Toyota’s business system and now being extended to an entire lean management system.

The intellectual basis for the Cambridge, MA-based Institute is described in a series of books and articles co-authored by Womack and Daniel Jones over the past 20 years. The most widely known books are: The Machine That Changed the World (Macmillan/Rawson Associates, 1990), Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Lean Solutions (Simon & Schuster, 2005), and Seeing The Whole Value Stream (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2011). Articles include: “From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise” (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1994), “Beyond Toyota: How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection” (Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996), “Lean Consumption” (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 2005).

Womack received a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970, a master’s degree in transportation systems from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1982 (for a dissertation on comparative industrial policy in the U.S., Germany, and Japan). During the period 1975-1991, he was a full-time research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices. As research director of MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program, Womack led the research team that coined the term “lean production” to describe Toyota’s business system.

Womack served as the Institute’s chairman and CEO from 1997 until 2010 when he was succeeded by John Shook.
Since returning to South Africa she has been working with a wide range of organisations in designing and implementing effective Lean programmes to ensure institutionalisation of process improvement. Samantha has a passion for training and skills development in Lean Management and is an accredited facilitator, assessor and moderator. She is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Prince 2 Project Practitioner.

Founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy United Kingdom. Daniel T. Jones is a senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, management thought leader, and mentor on applying lean process thinking to every type of business. He is the author with James P. Womack of the influential and popular management books that describe the principles and practice of lean thinking in production, The Machine that Changed the World, and Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Organization, and the workbookbook Seeing the Whole Value Stream. Their book Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together extends these ideas to consumption, provision, and service delivery. He is the publisher of Breaking Through to Flow, Creating Lean Dealers, and Making Hospitals Work. A sought-after keynoter, Jones also has organized Lean Summit conferences in Europe, including the Frontiers of Lean Summit, the First Global Lean Healthcare Summit, and the Lean Transformation Summit.

Jones advises organizations in different sectors on their lean transformations, helped establish the first company University in the UK at Unipart, wrote the UK Government’s Rethinking Construction report and Lean Thinking for the NHS. He organized the first Global Healthcare Summit, mentors a dozen hospitals in the UK, Italy and the USA and published Making Hospitals Work. Jones was the European Director of MIT’s Future of the Automobile and International Motor Vehicle Programs. He is advisor to the European Efficient Consumer Response movement and editor of the International Commerce Review. Jones holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Sussex.

Norman is the founder of the Lean Institute Africa, a Lean Executive Coach and formerly a Professor of Business Administration at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town. He was among the first researchers in South Africa to introduce innovative manufacturing and supply chain improvement concepts, such as lean manufacturing, into the country.

In recent years he has focused on implementation of lean management in the South African public health system although his experience spans across the mining, manufacturing and service sectors. He teaches on executive programmes at UCT and elsewhere. He continues to research the area of process improvement, with particular attention to large-scale systems.