Purpose – The Gemba‐Kaizen approach is a key business process strategy employed by companies (multinationals also) to enhance their manufacturing performance. However, whilst there is significant research information available on implementing management systems in a sequential manner, there...

Purpose – Since Masaaki Imai coined the term Kaizen in the mid 1980s it has been regarded as a key element in the competitiveness of Japanese companies. However, even though Kaizen was defined by the author who created the term, writings by scholars and practitioners in the field exhibit a...

Purpose – In recent years, small family businesses in Mexico have come under enormous pressure from their external environment: this has resulted in serious problems affecting the running of their businesses, leading ultimately to a drop off in sales, customers and market share. Some have...

Purpose – In response to external pressures that Spanish City Halls have been experiencing since the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, some of the local administrations have become references of success among the rest of the Spanish City Halls by focusing their efforts on making...

Purpose – An overall aim with a new human‐oriented TQM metrology is to help managers in giving answers to the questions of what to measure, how to measure and why? It is the purpose of this paper to give input to answering these questions. In doing so the measurement problems are to be...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review and identify the dominating paradigms within management control theories in order to investigate adoptability of the European excellence model (EEM) as an alternative management control model or a framework. Design/methodology/approach – The...

Purpose – Recently, the operations management academic literature has seen articles focusing on the transfer of “lean” thinking or kaizen concept from the private to the public sector. In Spain, during the last 15 years, some local councils have also followed similar improvement...

Purpose – Parallel with increasing awareness of importance in learning during the last few decades, numerous theorists from various disciplines have tried to shape ideas concerning learning seen from their perspectives. One negative consequence of these efforts has been observed as increased...

Purpose – The authors analyze the principles and results of lean production and compare the lean production philosophy with the six sigma quality process and the principles of total quality management (TQM). At the end of the paper, it is discussed how to build the necessary company culture...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss/reflect on some well‐known excellence frameworks or models in order to understand the development in the contents of excellence during the last 25 years and to understand the problems or limitations which such kind of models still...