Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is a management tool that allows the identification of activities that have no value in the processes examined. This identification leads to the improvement of these processes within any organization and promotes economic and social sustainability, and to a lesser extent environmental sustainability. Kaizen, already widely and successfully employed in the industrial sector, is now being applied in the health sector. However, the health sector tends to publish only the results of how processes have been improved in finely focused areas and the resulting benefits. The majority of the benefits focus on time and cost reduction. In this study, the authors carried out a bibliometric analysis using the Scimat program, which maps the thematic evolution of Kaizen in the health sector and its relationship with sustainability, in order to promote the interest of the health sector for this type of process improvement. The findings confirm that the implementation of Kaizen is recent and constantly evolves and grows, and that it can help economic and social sustainability, and to a lesser extent environmental sustainability.

Companies operate in a competitive and changing environment requiring increasingly effective and efficient management strategies. Lean is a proven philosophy in the industrial sector having helped companies to adapt to rapid market changes; to economic, technical, and social complexities; and to customer needs. For this reason, companies in the service sector are adopting Lean to improve their service management and to achieve economic, social, and environmental sustainability. This paper presents a model which uses Lean tools to facilitate the introduction of Lean in the management of primary care centers. The results show the implementation of Lean improved primary care center management, achieved stated objectives, and demonstrated faster adaptation to environmental needs and changes. The Lean philosophy developed and applied in the primary care center proved useful at a professional level facilitating developmental changes and prompting lasting improvements by developing a sustainable work culture.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to perform a context analysis about a specific Kaizen program, suggestion systems in permanent teams, and identified the barriers and facilitators that companies encounter while implementing them from the workers’ perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The authors applied an inductive method, the Grounded Theory, to develop a specific context theory using the information that emerged from a convenience sample of 182 workers in several countries. Findings: The facilitators and barriers identified for the workers in the field study are aligned with those identified in previous studies, generally obtained using information provided by managers. The methodology enabled us to identify the relationships between them and their level of relevance. Research limitations/implications: The main limitations were linked with the source of the data as the authors worked with a convenience sample and only analyzed the information provided by the workers. Practical implications: The identified facilitators, their relationships and their relevance, contribute to understand the functioning phenomena of suggestion systems in permanent teams to facilitate organizations using this continuous improvement program more effectively. Originality/value: The originality of this study, apart from identifying facilitators from the workers’ perspective, is that the used method enabled us to identify the relationships between them and know how the operators perceived their relevance.

Service companies in developed countries represent 70–80% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In Spain, within the service sector, tourism is the main contributor and is growing annually. This is obviously an opportunity for the country due to its benefits and economic effects but at the same time a well-structured, sustainable and competitive model for its continued development is needed in order to adopt best practices and reference innovative models from other sectors. A qualitative approach using Case Study, Grounded Theory and Delphi Method has been conducted to study the tourism sector in the city of Gandia, Valencia (Spain). Results show that a tourist destination with its different components and stakeholders involved in its value chain can be interpreted as an ecosystem and so reference ecosystem models could be adopted to boost the development of a region. Considering the results obtained, this study can contribute to the development of a tourist destination in a sustainable and innovative way.

Public administrations are organizations whose mission is to serve the interests of society by providing efficient and sustainable services. Much of the information received from public administrations uses social media due to their versatility and capacity to reach a large number of citizens. Among them, Twitter is the most widely used, especially to disseminate messages with a high social content. This type of messages falls within the discipline of social marketing. However, when public administrations use Twitter for social marketing communication, it is not known which factors are the most decisive to achieve the social objective for which they are issued. This article provides an answer to this question, using the Analytic Network Process Multicriteria method to determine which factors matter and how they are interrelated when issuing social marketing messages through Twitter. The result of this research reveals that from the 22 factors analyzed, the most influential from a social marketing point of view are the average age of population, the existence of a strategic communication plan, the number of tweets and the average number of tweets per day, the number of followers, retweets and mentions, as well as the efficiency of the account.

What do we know about rubrics used in higher education?