SAM Consulting Group

How do you satisfy a myriad of diverse customer needs while still maintaining and improving production efficiency and keep after market costs at bay? How do we engage all people in the organization to systematically improve toward a common goal? By focusing on nurturing a common way of thinking we will exceed our expectations. SAM was founded in Stockholm, Sweden in 1977 and became the first consultant firm to support clients applying Activity Based Costing [ABC]. In the mid 80’s professor Robert Kaplan at Harvard Business School joined the company for a few years. Together with professor H Thomas Johnson at Portland University, Prof. Kaplan wrote the renowned management book “Relevance lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting”. In the 90’s, with the aid of Prof Johnson, SAM established and facilitated the cooperation between Scania and Toyota, leading to the development of the Scania Way. Together SAM and Prof. Johnson also did research aiming to explain what characterizes extraordinarily durable and long-term profitable companies, in which Scania and Toyota were utilized as case studies. The research resulted in the book “Profit Beyond Measure”, written by SAM founder Anders Bröms and H Thomas Johnson, and was awarded the Shingo Prize for excellence in manufacturing research in 2001. The book launched the acronym MBM or “Management by Means” as the explanation for how that particular management strategy supports long-term profitability such as Scania’s and Toyota’s. SAM has for the past 25 years been pioneering the concept of modular design, or modularization, both in theory as well as in practice. Together with Scania, a world leader in modular design, SAM has developed a profound understanding of what creates a successful modular product program.