Purpose: This paper aims to investigate Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in the Brazilian context, seeking to identify its main characteristics and opportunities for future research.Design/methodology/approach: This study focuses on a literature review in the area of production engineering and operations management, where 104 relevant scientific publications were identified.Findings: The results show that the most important critical success factor for integrating LSS in Brazil is top management support and commitment. LSS integration occurs predominantly in large industrial companies, being incipient in small and medium-sized enterprises. In general, there is no structured way of applying LSS. A standard framework for LSS is still lacking.Research limitations/implications: This study is limited to a sample that only comprises Brazilian scientific studies.Practical implications: Professionals and practitioners can understand the evolution of LSS through practical applications and the main LSS tools used in both the industrial and services sectors. It also points out the critical success factor for the implementation of LSS. The study highlights several roadmaps for LSS implementation adopted by large and modern Brazilian automotive industries based on a robust technological base. This study also contributes to expanding the evidence base of LSS application, both in Brazil and in other countries.Originality/value: Some suggestions are proposed to clarify the structure and complexity of integrated implementation of LP and SS as well as expand the LSS application in small and medium-sized enterprises. This study is the first to discuss the current situation of LSS in Brazil and provide suggestions to expand LSS in the country. Comparisons of Brazilian LSS literature review with researches of others countries are also presented.
This study explores user-generated content (UGC) of the hotel sector in the city of Florianópolis-SC, Brazil, to identify the quality attributes of services and determine the polarity of the expressed feelings in the reviews of each attribute. The analysis is based on the latent topics and the polarity of feelings expressed in the reviews. UGC was collected using a crawler, resulting in a text corpus comprising 68,558 reviews. The polarity of feelings, positive or negative, was identified using sentiment analysis techniques and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify latent topics in the corpus associated with the attributes of hotel service quality. This study found that “room,” “location,” “ambience,” “staff,” “breakfast,” “parking,” “reservation,” and “cost-benefit” were the attributes most frequently assessed by consumers in their reviews. The attributes that generate the most negative reviews were “room,” “parking,” and “reservation.” The attributes “location,” “ambience,” “staff,” “breakfast,” and “cost-benefit” were the attributes that generated most of the positive reviews. When comparing the results of this study to those of previous studies, two attributes demonstrated greater prominence: the attribute “room” that attracted a high number of negative comments and the attribute “parking” that had not presented itself with the same level of relevance in other studies.
Practical and theoretical evidence suggests that Sustainable Lean Six Sigma contributes to an organization’s performance as it highlights environmental aspects. However, the theoretical contribution of Sustainable Lean Six Sigma has not been discussed enough in the literature, and many companies do not know where to begin integrating Sustainability and Lean Six Sigma in operation management. This paper aims to identify and discuss recent developments in Sustainable Lean Six Sigma frameworks through a systematic literature review, considering the benefits, outcomes, tools and practices, sustainability key performance indicators and critical success factors. The results show that Lean Six Sigma tools have been adapted to incorporate the measurement of environmental waste. However, sustainability key performance indicators must improve and there are few empirical studies on critical success factors for Sustainable Lean Six Sigma. This study also identified gaps in Sustainable Lean Six Sigma frameworks and gives directions for future research.
Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) is a renewable energy technology that uses wind power devices rather than traditional wind turbines that take advantage of the kinetic wind energy, and remain in the air due to aerodynamic forces. This article aims to compare the scientific literature with the patents on wind power with tethered airfoils, to obtain better insights into the literature of this area of knowledge. The method used in this study was a comparative bibliometric analysis, using the Web of Science and Derwent Innovations Index databases, and the Network Analysis Interface for Literature Review software and VosViewer. It was possible to verify the main authors, research centers and companies, countries and journals that publish on the subject; the most cited documents; the technological classes; and the networks of collaborations of this work. It was also possible to identify that researches on wind energy with tethered airfoils began their studies in the late 1970s with the first patent apparently dated from 1975 by the inventors Dai and Dai. The first scientific publication was in 1979 by authors Fletcher and Roberts, followed by Loyd in 1980. United States is the country that presented the highest number of patents and scientific papers. Both scientific papers and patents set up networks of collaboration; that is, important authors are interacting with others to establish cooperative partnerships.
23 June 2022 in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Car ownership has been the object of interest in various research areas. Studies on the topic focus especially on the influence of factors such as environment, life, family events, use, and availability, usually restricted to a given city or region. This paper focuses on recent studies that identified enablers, barriers, and trends related to car ownership in the automotive sector. We use an exploratory-qualitative approach based on systematic mapping of the literature to select papers published between 2019 and March 2021 on the Scopus database. As a result, we first classified the factors that act as enablers or barriers to the acquisition and maintenance of cars. These factors were divided into the following six groups: personal, cultural, political, economic, technological, and environmental. Next, we identified car-ownership-related trends for the automotive sector: purchase replaced by effective use; restrictions on car ownership; autonomous driving; sustainable mobility; new mobility models; customized customer service; real-time integrated modal communication, systematic global traffic, and integrated urban planning. We consider our findings to be relevant contributions to the industry in relation to establishing strategies and public administrators acting in the transportation planning field.
11 July 2019 in Journal of Food Process Engineering