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Teachers of primary education experience high levels of stress but lack rational coping strategies to reduce their work stress. The paper develops a value stream mapping for education approach and examines its use as a rational coping strategy for teams of teachers and other employees to overcome work-related stressors.

The research process consists of two phases. First, a value stream mapping approach for education is developed, based on literature research. Next, the approach is validated in an action research study to reduce work stress of teachers in educational services. The processes that have been selected by the teachers relate to coping with increased variety, long and uncertain throughput times and unclear specifications.

Value stream mapping for education (VSM4EDU) is a well-structured improvement method based on principles of visualization, participation and process thinking, which helps teachers without background in lean thinking to analyse their processes. Using this method has enabled the team to develop rational coping strategies to reduce their work-related stress.

VSM4EDU has been validated using action research at a single school, which implicates deep insight, but further testing at other schools is welcome. Moreover, VSM4EDU has not been used to develop a future state map.

Value stream mapping is useful in educational settings as long as the educational context is respected in the approach.

VSM4EDU empowers teachers and helps to develop co-operation in teams.

The validation of value stream mapping for education is well-documented and original.

A lean approach is frequently applied in the primary processes of a company, but less in after-sales service. Servitization leads to a change from pure product providers to integrated product-service systems (PSS) providers. The after-sales services may benefit from a lean approach to effectively integrate usage data of the installed product base. This paper aims to develop a lean servitization canvas to open-up possibilities for additional revenue streams for organizations in the after-sales market.

This paper develops and proposes the use of a lean servitization canvas for effective after-sales services by drawing on insights from two industrial cases where physical goods are produced and serviced. Both cases are within the train maintenance and rail infrastructure sector in Central Europe. Based primarily on a literature review, a lean servitization canvas has been developed and further validated in the case studies.

The paper shows how value can be achieved for providers of integrated PSS by adopting the lean servitization canvas.

The research focuses on industrial services for high-capital goods in the rail and infrastructure sectors. This can be seen as a limitation of the research, as the lean servitization canvas has not yet been tested in other sectors.

For companies, the use of a lean approach to servitization integrates primary processes and after-sales services and offers new opportunities to develop business.

This paper provides insights into how the current product range and customer base of a company may be included in an after-sales business model that benefits from a lean approach.

The purpose of this paper is to address the impact of a multidivisional structure on the implementation of lean manufacturing. It investigates how the controls employed by the corporate level impact the local implementation of lean manufacturing.

The paper reports on case studies in three subsidiaries in different multidivisional organisations.

The paper finds that lean manufacturing can be severely constrained by the accounting-based controls which are commonly in place in a multidivisional structure. Depending on the degree of centralisation, subsidiaries may be restricted to implementing lean tools in a fragmented way, rather than acting according to a coherent set of principles.

Companies may have to accept that being part of a multidivisional organisation can imply that their lean implementation is more gradual and piecemeal than they prefer. The paper proposes several ways to mitigate the constraints that may arise from incompatibilities between accounting-based controls and lean controls.

This study contributes to the literature about external constraints on production innovations, such as lean manufacturing. It highlights how the organisational context creates local conditions that may be detrimental to the implementation of lean manufacturing.

This research aims to explore the enabling and constraining effects of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and speculate on how these can be linked to the four generic roles of operations management (OM) proposed by Slack et al.

This research understands ERP as boundary objects characterised by modularity, abstraction, accommodation, and standardization. An in‐depth cross‐disciplinary literature review and role synthesis is conducted.

Four enabling and three constraining effects of ERP are deduced from existing literature. ERP and OM are linked conceptually. Based on the identified effects of ERP, the paper speculates on the managerial tasks of the production and operations manager (POM) in an ERP environment and lists a set of central concerns of potential relevance to POM and to future research.

The identified roles of ERP and their implications could be empirically tested using case based and survey research.

The results provide insights into how ERP has multiple and parallel roles, and how these roles are relevant to the function of OM. Such knowledge is valuable for practicing POMs in managing the implementation and design of ERP to support the different domains of OM.

Current studies of the effects of ERP and their link to the practice of OM tend to focus on one or a few roles of the emerging system. Such studies do not properly take into account the modularised and pluralistic nature of ERP. This research provides a platform from where future research on the effects, managerial dilemmas and implications of ERP can be reconciled across research communities.

This paper aims to clarify the challenge of emerging countries’ firms regarding their brand policy. The purpose of the paper is to examine the branding options offered to emerging countries companies when expanding internationally.

After having clarified the two paradoxes faced by emerging countries’ brands by way of synthesizing various works, the author formulates a model that provides a representation for the possible brand strategy choices of emerging country companies.

The authors formulate a framework with four brand management options which may be put into practice in emerging countries’ companies and suggest how an emerging country’s company could create and develop the best-adapted international brand policy depending on its specific situation regarding localness emphasis and customers’ risk reduction acceptance.

Results lead to the conclusion that the notion that only global brands are associated with higher product quality or prestige (in relation to local brands) is not a universal truth and thus needs to be interpreted with caution. The research provides support for a branding strategy embedded in the local emerging countries context and tally with research showing that more and more firms from emerging economies are using foreign image association strategies as important components of their branding and marketing strategies.

The proposal reinforces the contingency perspective of international marketing according to which brand policy may depend on company criteria, as well as foreign market specificities. The research confirms the competitive capacity of emerging countries’ companies’ brands, broadens the scope of international branding knowledge by shifting the focus to under-researched regions of the world.

This paper aims to give a comprehensive review, summary, and discussion on inventory models that have appeared in the literature. During these past ten decades, no seminal paper reviewing the field of inventory lot sizing has even been published. This limitation has been identified in the literature by several researchers over the years, with the sheer volume of the number of published inventory lot sizing models acting as a factor which has limited a research endeavor to review the literature on inventory lot sizing models.

This article reviews research on inventory lot size models and provides a review of previously published literature review papers on inventory models. Based on this initial review, the literature extending current research practices on inventory modeling in supply chains and in sustainable practices is presented. Directions for expanding research in these two areas are examined in light of concerns expressed in the historical use of inventory models and in light of a new inventory research paradigm.

In our paper, we have adopted a novel strategy to overcome this limitation by focusing our review on a review of inventory lot sizing review papers.

By adopting the methodology of reviewing published inventory review papers, we can contribute a comprehensive review of the inventory lot sizing literature that serves to provide in one paper a consolidation of inventory research that can serve as a single source to keep researchers up to date with the research developments in inventory lot sizing models. We also identify gaps in the field which could stimulate new research agendas in the areas of supply chain management and sustainable inventory practices.