Professor Peter Hines, is Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Research Centre at Cardiff Business School. He holds a BA (MA) in geography from Cambridge University and an MBA and PhD from the University of Cardiff. Peter followed a successful career in distribution and manufacturing industry before joining Cardiff Business School in 1992. Since that time he initially led the Materials Management Unit and now chairs the Lean Enterprise Research Centre within Cardiff Business School. The Lean Enterprise Research Centre is the largest dedicated research centre in Lean Thinking in the world.

He has undertaken extensive research into Lean Thinking and Supply Chain Management in both the automotive and other industries and has pioneered a number of key concepts, methods and applications in Europe, including: Supplier Associations (now involving over 800 European firms), Value Stream Mapping, Network Sourcing, the Three Tier System of Management and the Value Stream Analysis Tool. He has written or co-written several books including "Creating World Class Suppliers” published by Pitman in 1994, "The Lean Enterprise” published by AMACOM in 1997, "Value Stream Management” published by Financial Times Prentice Hall in 2000 and Staying Lean published in 2008 which won a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize Recipient for 2009.