Prof Norman Faull
Emeritus Professor Norman Faull is the Chairman of the Lean Institute Africa and formally a Professor of Business Administration at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town. He teaches on MBA and executive programmes at UCT and elsewhere.
He was among the first wave of researchers in South Africa to introduce innovative manufacturing and supply chain efficiency 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. He has learnt that lean is simply a system for creating thinking people. It improves service delivery, lowers production costs, and is hugely people empowering and hence ultimately sets people up for success.
Professor Faull has a BSc and BEng in Aeronautical Engineering from Stellenbosch University, an MSc from Cranfield University in the UK, and a PhD and MBA from the University of Cape Town. He is a founding member of the Lean Institute Africa, which is an NGO (and member of the Lean Global Network) that focus on public sector service delivery system strengthening using lean methodology.
Prof Faull also founded the Manufacturing Round Table that shared research to improve competitiveness. He was a founder member of St Lukes Hospice in Cape Town.
In his spare time, Prof Faull enjoys spending time with his family and keeping fit and healthy.
Dr Anton Grütter
Anton Grütter is the CEO of the Lean Institute Africa. He has taught operations management at a number of South African universities since 1993 and he is a visiting professor at Shanghai University.
Anton completed his PHD in 2007, with his dissertation title being “A Multi-Case Investigation into the Effectiveness of Shop Floor Improvement Teams at South African Manufacturers”. Prior to this he completed his MBA in 1992. Both his PHD and MBA were completed at the Graduate School of Business- University of Cape Town. He also has BA (Psychology) degree awarded from the University of Cape Town.
In 2010 Dr Grütter’s textbook “Introduction to Operations Management” was published by Heinemann.
He has presented at many international conferences, most recently at the Lean Enterprise Institute’s summit in China. Currently he is working with several public sector organisations and NGOs in the justice and healthcare sector on the introduction and institutionalisation of programmes to improve operational performance.
In his free time, he likes to sail his Hobie 16 on Langebaan lagoon!
Dr Melvin Moodley
Melvin Moodley qualified as a medical doctor in 2000 at the University of Kwazulu-Natal. In 2004, he moved to Cape Town where he developed an interest in Emergency Medicine.
After several years as an emergency physician in both the public and private sector, and a slowly manifesting interest in systems improvement, an academic restlessness compelled Melvin to join the UCT Graduate school of Business, MBA program. While on the program he was exposed to Lean, and was hooked. Here was a scientific approach to systems improvement that could be applied to his other passion, healthcare.
Melvin used the lean methodology to implement multiple improvements in a hospital and used this as a basis for his thesis on Sustaining Lean Improvements in an Emergency Department.
Following the completion of the MBA, he joined the Western Cape Department of Health, first as a consultant and subsequently as a Hospital CEO. He has facilitated Introduction to Lean workshops for the Western Cape Department of Health, and is on the teaching panel for the Lean Management Workshop from the Graduate School of Business.
Melvin spends his free time with his family. While committed to a healthy lifestyle, he will rarely pass the opportunity to try a new and interesting wine. He also loves reading, although he has an odd aversion to crime fiction. He is passionate about teaching.
Dr Heather Tuffin
Dr Heather Tuffin is a frustrated clinician who graduated from medical school in 2000. She worked for some years in the public health system and then ran away to sea, where she travelled the world and learned customer service from the best in the industry. She was also indoctrinated into a culture of safety in an environment where one ill-thought out action could sink the house.
She returned to the South African public health service in 2008 where, finding it impossible to practise medicine in the way she’d like – give patients a positive experience, actually save some lives and even have fun doing it! – she opted rather to help to change the system so that the next generation could.
Since 2009 she has been working with hospitals in the Western Cape to improve flow of patients using lean and other aspects of improvement science (the latter studied through the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Improvement Advisor programme).
In February 2013, Heather convened the Patient Flow Collaborative, bringing to together groups of hospitals to improve inhospital mortality through addressing patient flow into, through and out of the hospital. 3 out of the 4 early-adopter hospitals have so far seen significant drops in mortality rates, 2 of which have sustained this reduction for more than 10 months (at the time of writing).
Heather also convenes the Patient Safety & Flow and Quality Improvement modules for the Patient Safety track of the MPhil in Emergency Medicine at UCT.
Areas of academic and professional interest include improvement science, complex adaptive systems, staff morale and patient-centred practice.
Heather lives in Hout Bay with her 2 teenagers, Bridget and Kelor, who are the light of her existence. She enjoys reading, spending time with family and friends and plays an active role in her local church. She dislikes prawns, waking up early and writing in the third person!!!