Purpose: – As reimbursements fall and costs for services climb, organizations are forced to follow the painful motto of doing more with less. A solution could be the adaptation of industrial business process improvement (BPI) methods such as Lean to the hospital setting (HS). The purpose of this paper is to analyze if Lean approaches related in the literature provide sufficient methodological support for other practitioners to reproduce the reported results. Design/methodology/approach: – The authors analyzed the published Lean literature in the HS using a methodological maturity-level framework and what the authors defined as the 11 characteristic activities of BPI. Findings: – The literature analysis reveals that a Lean approach with a high-methodological maturity level that includes the 11 characteristic activities of BPI has never been reported. Considering this, the paper suggests a meta model for a high-methodological maturity-level Lean method based on the characteristic activities of BPI. Originality/value: – This is the first study on the Lean approach in the HS that evidences the absence of a robust Lean methodology in the literature. For Lean to be adopted and implemented by hospital practitioners a structured robust method should be provided.

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in agriculture is far from their potential. In this article, we consider how to facilitate and systematize the process of transforming traditional agriculture into digital agriculture; Agriculture 4.0. Among the different technologies, we focus on the IoT aspects. In the article, we propose a new approach for the design of intelligent agricultural management and supervision systems. The proposed approach is illustrated as an example of application in the beekeeping sector. Indeed, this sector is affected by a crisis due to the disappearance of bees and the different actors need support to make their decisions. As an example of decisions that can be made, we can cite: treatment planning or policy planning. An architecture based on sensors and open data is proposed to help them make decisions. An implementation of it is shown; it is based on a device with sensors, as well as an interface to collect the data on beehives and show notifications and alerts to beekeepers. The proposed architecture is flexible, and it can be used in the context of different levels of technology maturity. The final objective is to develop a reusable architecture for Agriculture 4.0.