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This study explores how Lean was deployed in several hospitals in the Apulia region in Italy over 3.5 years.

An exploratory qualitative design was drawn up based on semi-structured interviews.

The drivers of Lean in hospitals were to increase patient satisfaction and improve workplace well-being by eliminating non-value-add waste. The participants highlighted three key elements of the pivotal implementation stages of Lean: introduction, spontaneous and informal dissemination and strategic level implementation and highlighted critical success and failure factors that emerged for each of these stages. During the introduction, training and coaching from an external consultant were among the most impactful factors in the success of pilot projects, while time constraints and the adoption of process analysis tools were the main barriers to implementation. The experiences of the Lean teams strongly influence the process of spontaneous dissemination aided by the celebration of project results and the commitment of the departmental hospital heads.

Lean culture can spread to allow many projects be conducted spontaneously, but the Lean paradigm can struggle to be adopted strategically. Lean in healthcare can fail because of the lack of alignment of Lean with leadership in healthcare and with their strategic vision, a lack of employees' project management skills and crucially the absence of a Lean steering committee.

The absence of managerial expertise and a will to support Lean implementation do not allow for systemic adoption of Lean. This is one of the first and largest long-term case studies on a Lean cross-regional multi-hospital application in healthcare.

This paper aims to report findings from a study on factors that made value for money (VFM) in private finance initiative (PFI) projects vulnerable to variations. It seeks to identify the top influencing factors, rank them according to the relative strength of influence, and explore their interactivity.

The study uses a documentary review of full business cases of five PFI projects, published reports, and scholarly publications to identify the list of factors; and a questionnaire survey of 44 PFI projects in the UK to establish the ranking of importance.

The findings reveal that PFI projects are more strongly affected by client‐driven internal factors than external factors. Internal factors, such as design change in the development phase and requests for new works or services in the operational phase were also likely to act independently, while external factors, including conditions for approval, movement in construction costs and change in PFI guidelines, worked interactively.

The research findings add to the knowledge of priority factors that need to be addressed to enhance the achievement of long‐term VFM in PFI projects.

The study is one of the few studies that have investigated VFM of PFI projects from a whole life cycle and dynamic perspective. It reveals not only a list of main influencing factors of project VFM, but also interrelationship between these factors.

Describes how the terms system effectiveness from a logistics perspective and life cycle cost effectiveness were designed into the Gripen combat aircraft and how they are now being taken care of in the operational phase. Notes that in the early concept phase, there was focus on availability performance and life support cost. To ensure future operational and support cost the contract between the vendor and customer included logistic parameters that were to be predicted and followed‐up during the design phase. The Gripen system is today in operational use and operational data is continuously collected and monitored and provides essential input to the process of continuous improvement of the product and the support system. Concludes that working with a focus on availability performance and life support cost over the product life cycle has helped to develop a state‐of‐the‐art high performing aircraft both in terms of operational performance and cost effectiveness.

Most successful companies have adopted some type of improvement methodology to achieve optimum performance, high quality, lower costs and productivity. Some of the structured methodologies employed indiscriminately are total quality management, quality control, agile, lean and Six Sigma which yield varied results. The purpose of this paper is to explore how to harness the power of an integrated system of quality tools and techniques to create operational excellence. An integrated framework involves matching quality tools and techniques to the multi-phases (input, transformation and output) of lean manufacturing or service ecosystem.

Current research of lean quality systems provides a conceptual understanding of core tools employed by manufacturing and service organizations. Interviewing domain experts from a series of manufacturing and service organizations highlighted a common challenge. The challenge was lean tools and methodologies were selected and employed arbitrarily for the different operational phases, which resulted in selective synergies of tools between operational phases. This limitation resulted in rework and duplication of quality efforts through the diverse phases of the transformation system. This study is based on the hypothesis that all phases of an operational system must be linked by common tools and methodologies which enables harnessing quality benefits and synergies throughout the entire operational system. The study methodology trailed through cooperative inquiry using a case study approach to design an integrated framework of tools that facilitates a common platform for manufacturing or service ecosystems.

This study suggests that quality systems in a complex competitive environment must consider an integrated iterative approach. An iterative development of lean quality tools for multiple phases produces an integrated quality system. Such systems employ blending and extending of lean quality tools to multiple phases of the transformation system to synthesize agile and versatile quality system.

A limitation of this study is that the research of integrated framework is based on repertory grid technique only; it should be supplemented by other methods. Second, the proposed framework does not consider the complexity added by the internal and external stakeholders as they interface with the integrated system at different points with reference to phases of the system.

One of the advantages of this method is its generality, instead of delivering a monolithic system at the culmination of long transformation process we rely on smaller quality sprints which are implemented sequentially at each stage or phase of the transformation system. The phenomena of incremental clustering of time-series of quality sprints for different phases results in true integration from end to end for a transformation system.

This study helps investigate the personal constructs that users and managers employ to interpret and select quality tools or methodologies for the different phases of lean transformational system.

This study aims to understand the impact of blending quality and business process improvement tools and methodologies to enhance outcomes. The basis of this study is “the power of multiplicity” through which a diverse collection of improvement paths is pooled into an integrated framework of quality tools for lean and efficient operations.

A study of the current practices for evaluating the ex-post performance of public-private partnership (PPP) school projects in Australia via literature review and qualitative case studies has found that no consistent approach exists for evaluating operational performance. A detailed critique of international PPP audits and practices has identified existing gaps in ex-post performance evaluation. Through a process of comparative analysis and industry confirmation, a performance analysis technique aligned with international practice has been developed that can be utilised by the educational departments across Australia to evaluate the ex-post performance of PPP projects (PPPs). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper opted for qualitative archival analysis of case studies using pattern matching, explanation building, time series, and comparative analysis. The data used for document analysis included value reports, project summaries, and contract documents, as well as local and international audit guidelines.

This paper reviewed current practices, identified a range of processes, and reported the best practices. However, consideration of the approaches taken in the UK and Australia for evaluating operational performance indicates that current techniques lack consistency.

The developed ex-post performance measurement framework is limited to Australian PPP school projects and, at this stage, cannot be generalised to other social PPP projects.

The paper includes implications for the development of better performance evaluation practices and audits.

An enhanced framework for measuring operational performance will increase the accountability of taxpayers in the content of their utilisation by the government.

This paper presents an enhanced ex-post performance measurement framework for education departments across Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and quantify the key components of the overall cost of software development when warranty coverage is given by a developer. Also, the authors have studied the impact of imperfect debugging on the optimal release time, warranty policy and development cost which signifies that it is important for the developers to control the parameters that cause a sharp increase in cost.

An optimization problem is formulated to minimize software development cost by considering imperfect fault removal process, faults generation at a constant rate and an environmental factor to differentiate the operational phase from the testing phase. Another optimization problem under perfect debugging conditions, i.e. without error generation is constructed for comparison. These optimization models are solved in MATLAB, and their solutions provide insights to the degree of impact of imperfect debugging on the optimal policies with respect to software release time and warranty time.

A real-life fault data set of Radar System is used to study the impact of various cost factors via sensitivity analysis on release and warranty policy. If firms tend to provide warranty for a longer period of time, then they may have to bear losses due to increased debugging cost with more number of failures occurring during the warrantied time but if the warranty is not provided for sufficient time it may not act as sufficient hedge during field failures.

Every firm is fighting to remain in the competition and expand market share by offering the latest technology-based products, using innovative marketing strategies. Warranty is one such strategic tool to promote the product among masses and develop a sense of quality in the user’s mind. In this paper, the failures encountered during development and after software release are considered to model the failure process.

To determine the optimal software warranty period in continuous and discrete circumstances where the difference between the software testing environment and the operational environment can be characterised by an environment factor.

Software reliability models based on continuous and discrete time non‐homogeneous Poisson processes are assumed to describe the failure occurrence phenomena under both environments. Based on the idea of accelerated life testing for hardware products, the operational profile of the software is modeled, and the total expected software cost incurred in both testing and operational phases is formulated.

Under a milder condition, the optimal warranty period which minimizes the total software cost is derived analytically.

This paper introduces the operational profile of software to model the difference between the testing environment and the operational environment.

The purpose of the present work is to mathematically model the reliability growth of a multi-version software system that is affected by infected patches.

The work presents a mathematical model that studies the reliability change due to the insertion of an infected patch in multi-version software. Various distribution functions have been considered to highlight the varied aspects of the model. Furthermore, weighted criteria approach has been discussed to facilitate the choice of the model.

The model presented here is able to quantify the effect of an infected patch on multi-version software. The model captures the hike in bug content due to an infected patch.

Multi-version systems have been studied widely, but the role of an infected patch has not been yet explored. The effect of an infected patch has been quantified by modeling the extra bugs generated in the system. This bug count would prove helpful in further studies for optimal resource allocation and testing effort allocation.

The purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical insight and practical guidance on how both process firms and equipment manufacturers can address the challenges posed by collaboration during the operational stage of the process technology/equipment life cycle.

Motives and driving forces for entering collaborative projects far from always converge, and while some projects require deep and long‐lasting relationships, others call for pure transactions and arms‐length relationships. The questions of why, when and how collaboration should take place and be organised and managed are addressed and discussed in the light of the literature on technology diffusion and technology transfer, and supplemented by ideas from industry professionals.

A tentative list of potential pros and cons has been compiled to serve as an embryo for further creation of a more complete set of expected outcomes with a view to developing a firm benchmarking instrument for establishing new collaborative relationships. Subsequently, a conceptual model of the full life‐cycle of process technology/equipment is developed to create a platform for determining collaboration intensity and success factors during different phases. Finally, a matrix with the dimensions “type of capability” and “expected performance improvements” is introduced as a tool for selection of different forms of collaboration.

The main limitation is that so far this is only a theoretical framework, but as such it will serve as a new platform and a guide for further empirical studies of this important yet under‐researched area.

This area of technology and innovation management research for the process industries has not been addressed before in depth. The new framework can already be deployed by industry professionals in their efforts to improve inter‐company collaboration and technology transfer, but also as a means of avoiding unintended technology diffusion.

This study aims to observe different purchasing and evaluation phases during the buying of business services, thus revealing the necessity for integration of different entities during the purchasing process.

On the basis of a systematic analysis, explorative case study methods involving five Swiss multinational companies are used. In addition, the study provides a structured literature review and uses the short-term perspective of the industrial marketing and purchasing (imp) approach as a conceptual approach.

In addition to specific and business service-related difficulties, the research observes different phases “levels of integration” within the evaluation process that takes place within a company: a preparation phase, an acquisition phase and an operational phase.

The study is limited to a qualitative research approach addressing five cases from Switzerland. However, assuming the results are generalizable, future research on service evaluation should always differentiate between the different phases of an evaluation.

It is shown that for practitioners, social, financial, service and informational exchange (as per imp approach) is closely related to an adequate integration of all involved entities during the different phases of purchasing. Therefore, this research provides practical support for the purchasing process to ensure highly efficient business services.

As there has been almost no research on business service evaluation, this paper is the first work known to extend the short-term perspective of the imp approach by addressing the different purchasing phases of an integrated service evaluation.