Stuart Burge          John Hughes          Stephen Walsh

Stuart Burge

Stuart was recruited by the GEC management college at Dunchurch in 1988 to exploit his knowledge of systems engineering and quality improvement to develop consultancy and training in Six Sigma. Since then Stuart has been actively involved in helping several companies successfully implement Six Sigma. In June 2000 Stuart, Stephen Walsh and John Hughes formed the Burge Hughes Walsh Partnership.

In his earlier career Stuart was employed by British Aerospace (now BAE SYSTEMS), where he conducted research into advanced flight control system design. He obtained his doctorate in 1984 and continued working for BAE until 1985. Since that time Stuart has worked as a systems engineer before obtaining a lectureship in Engineering at Lancaster University in 1989. During this period Stuart was involved in research and consultancy in quality improvement and systems design. Over the past ten years he has worked with GPT, ALSTOM and Marconi on project-based improvement and design activities. Current customers include BAE SYSTEMS, Bookham Technologies, E2V Technologies, Visteon and Network Rail.

Stuart’s expertise covers improvement activities such as Six Sigma and also engineering design that includes systems engineering and Design for Six Sigma. His activities cover senior management workshops, consultancy and training and facilitation of product development teams and process improvement teams.

Stuart has strong links with academic institutes and is a Visiting Fellow of the Universities of Lancaster and Loughborough. He has published over 40 technical papers, journal articles and has recently published his first text book on intelligent Systems Design.

John Hughes

John started his working life in the car industry, designing and implementing computer-based production planning and control systems for part of what was then the British Leyland Group of Companies. After eight years of doing this he then spent a short amount of time doing the same thing for GKN Birfield. He re-joined BL to work in computer systems planning for the Body and Assembly Division. This was followed by periods in Tool and Die Planning and then Industrial Relations.

He then left BL to go back to university at Oxford to do research into the relationship between company strategy, structure and the dominant technology used by the company. He then moved to the London Business School first as a researcher looking at the development of information systems within companies. He was then appointed as a lecturer teaching Business Policy.

During his period as a mature student he had undertaken part-time teaching for the Open University, specialising in systems courses. The opportunity to join the OU full-time arose as the result of a substantial grant that its Faculty of Technology had received from government to develop the first courses aimed at continuous professional development for engineers and managers and which used distance learning. These innovative courses addressed the need for technological updating and to provide the route to a qualification. He chaired the development and subsequent delivery of two courses dealing with the structure and design of modern manufacturing systems and with international operations management. He also played a part in the work of the Faculty’s Contract Training Unit that provided bespoke course for industrial clients. John held the position of Director of the Manufacturing: Management and Technology MSc Programme for ten years. During this period he also initiated and directed the development of the Faculty’s MBA in Technology Management.

As part of his commitment to industrial education, he has worked with the other partners in Burge Hughes Walsh for over ten years and is committed to developing and delivering innovative programmes and courses that meet the needs of our clients in our area of focus, operations.

Stephen Walsh

The Burge Hughes Walsh Partnership was formed following a ten-year employment with Marconi (previously GEC plc). Stephen’s role in Marconi was twofold: he worked as Business Excellence Adviser in the Marconi Business Excellence Centre and he was one of the Business Group Manager's acting as tutor/consultants in the Process Excellence Team at the Dunchurch Conference Centre. Though there may have been two roles, Stephen regarded them as sharing the same mission: ‘to accelerate business improvement in Marconi plc’.

In his time at Dunchurch, Stephen has been instrumental in the development of corporate programmes that have been fundamental in the performance improvement of GEC/Marconi businesses. These included the Diploma in Manufacturing Management, support training for Six Sigma and for the Capability Maturity Model, the Masterclass, which introduces world class practitioners to senior management, and assessor training to use the Business Excellence Model. He has helped many companies by facilitating workshops and improvement projects both in the boardroom and on the shop floor. He prefers the term ‘facilitator’ to ‘consultant', believing that facilitation is about “helping people to help themselves”.  Projects yield typical savings of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

He was responsible for the creation of the GEC Benchmarking Forum in 1995, which was the first major corporate network group in GEC that had process improvement as its primary focus. He also helped to set up the Business Excellence Centre to support corporate-wide use of self assessment for business improvement.

Prior to joining GEC in September 1990, Stephen worked as a manufacturing consultant for the Open University, with clients such as IBM, Thorn Lighting, EMI and Philips. Previously he spent twelve years as a manufacturing engineer with TI Group and operated in many of its engineering divisions.  He qualified at Bath University with a joint honours degree in Engineering with German and attained an MSc from Cranfield University.