Software process improvement methods help to continuously refine and adjust the software process to improve its performance (e.g., in terms of leadtime, quality of the software product, reduction of change requests, and so forth). Lean software development propagates two important principles that help process improvement, namely identification of waste in the process and considering interaction...

In order to face their global competitors, one solution consists for manufacturing companies around the world to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS). Lean manufacturing evolved from TPS. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that lean principles and concepts can be successfully applied in a company from the retail industry, such as Seven-Eleven Japan. Lean retailing is now a reali...

An increasing number of ERP providers offer support of Lean Management in their software. As part of a larger research project this article gives an insight which elements of Lean Management are already covered by ERP-systems. More than 150 different functionalities within the ERP-systems have been identified that support Lean Management. Not surprising production planning, scheduling and pull ...

This work focuses on the analogies and the differences between Lean Management and Extreme Programming. Lean Management (LM) is a management strategy that continuously tries to improve business processes focusing only on activities that provide value to the customer. The word lean means that only activities that increase the provided value for the customer are performed. Any additional activiti...

In this paper, we present a first attempt to integrate Collaboration Engineering with Lean Six Sigma principles applied to Project-based Learning. On the one hand, collaboration is a social and interactive process, where participants join efforts toward a shared common goal. On the other hand, Lean Six Sigma is a unique methodology integrating a shared language, statistical measuring and effect...

Together with reuse and material recycling, remanufacturing has emerged as a sustainable approach for used products. Remanufacturing is more complex than manufacturing, due to the uncertainties in material and information flows inside the remanufacturing facility and along the product life-cycle. Therefore, some remanufacturers intend to use lean production principles and philosophies to deal w...

Lean management principles were first developed in the 1950s in the industrial setting of car manufacturing, and the first laboratory was the Toyota manufacturing plant. Further, Womack and Jones are credited in developing the field [1]. Over the past half a century, lean thinking has become more widely embraced, particularly in manufacturing and industrial settings. More recently, it has been ...

BACKGROUND Lean thinking as a quality improvement approach is introduced in hospitals worldwide, although evidence for its impact is scarce. Lean initiatives are social, complex and context-dependent. This calls for a shift from cause-effect to conditional attributions to understand how lean works. In this study, we bring attention to the transformative power of local translation, which creates...

In this study, possible paracrine factors in adipose tissue from lean and obese subjects were sought. Conditioned media were prepared by incubation in alpha minimum essential medium of adipocyte precursors derived from lean and massively obese subjects. Adipocyte-precursor-derived conditioned media from the obese stimulated replication of cultured rat perirenal adipocyte precursors by about fou...