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Digital transformations are changing society, and they force industries to react to the market more frequently. Managers are aware of new technical demands, which increase the pressure of meeting those demands. To meet technical demands, radical innovations are one way to stay competitive. However, it is more complex to make them a part of the business. The purpose of this study was to create a framework for small and medium-sized enterprises to become more efficient by starting to digitalise their business processes with the expertise of an external innovation partner.

The study was performed at a case company with an abductive approach where both deduction and induction were used to study the empirical findings and formulate new theories in relation to recognised theory. Qualitative methods have been used in the empirical study due to their flexibility and the fact that the focus of the information gathering was to create a context.

The analysis indicates that a certain level of process maturity can be put in relation to a certain innovation level and a certain level of digital change. According to a process maturity model, an adaptable process could respond to changes in customer demands better, which can be related to changes in the business domain and the society. The research resulted in a conceptual cooperative model based on the three domains of the study. The model has been validated using design reviews with the case company, a consultancy firm and together with an innovation partner.

The model will be a practical template for Small and Medium Enterprises to follow when digitalising business processes and how to prioritise them.

The proposed framework of how to digitalise at different innovation levels coupled to process maturity levels is a novel idea that could be used for further research.

Today’s organisations face the challenge of measuring the right things and then using those measurements as a starting point to work with improved quality. The failure to generate a shared value base is pointed out as one main cause for the inability to effectively apply quality management and lean within organisations; thus, it appears central to measure these values. However, the measuring of values and behaviours seems to be missing within both concepts. Therefore, there is a need for a tool that measures not only quality values but also behaviours that support or obstruct a quality culture. The purpose of this paper is to describe how a measuring tool which measures quality culture can be designed and structured.

A project with the aim to measure and develop quality culture started in 2015 by three Swedish universities/institutes and seven organisations. During several workshops, quality values and supportive and obstructive behaviours were developed and described. This resulted in a survey where employees of the participating organisations ranked performance and importance of the described behaviours. The results were presented and discussed in a fourth workshop.

A framework of behaviours and a measurement tool for a quality culture are presented in this paper.

The framework of behaviours, supporting or obstructing a quality culture, is original and may be very useful to diagnose and develop a quality culture.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate service improvements in a manufacturing context.

Action research at the gas turbine manufacturer Siemens was performed during a five‐year period. In addition, 336 fault reports sent to the service division concerning severity, cost, and occurrence were analyzed.

When moving from a fire‐fighting culture to a proactive culture, a company needs to change from a product to a process perspective. The benefit of changing from a product to a process perspective is the change in focus from reduction of internal costs to value creation through service delivery.

This paper shows how feedback from dissatisfied customers can be used as a driving factor in process improvements. Based on this knowledge, a company can select the most important Six Sigma projects to improve their service processes. The change from a product to a process perspective shows that traditionally the severity of almost 50 percent of all faults is underestimated.

The paper provides a number of fruitful insights on how to work with service improvements in manufacturing companies.

The aim of this paper is to develop a model to help service organizations to set the specification limits according to the customer expectations.

A review of relevant literature has been used to develop a new integrated model with ideas from the Kano model, SERVQUAL, Taguchi loss function, Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) and a new model, “the Trade‐Off Importance”. A survey was carried out with 18 external customers and internal stakeholders of the Service Division of Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB in Finspong, Sweden.

The model has demonstrated its robustness and credibility to set the specification limits. Additionally, it is a very powerful tool for service quality measurement and to set strategic directions.

First, articles published on this subject are few and there is no similar model in the literature to confirm or compare results. The proposed model must be further validated in future research. Second, this study is applied in a single service division, with a relatively small sample. Ideally, research should be conducted using multiple industries in order to ensure that the model is generalizable.

To the best of one's knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to create a road‐map to set the specification limits in services. Researchers should find that the proposed model fills the research gap. From a managerial standpoint the practical benefits in Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB suggest a new way of communicating to customers. The model will also improve the target setting in the Six Sigma projects.

Many practitioners strive to increase the efficiency of their product development. In addition, smaller companies must satisfy customers’ expectations of their product development. These expectations can be e.g. use of specific methodologies such as Lean Product Development (LPD) and/or Design for Six Sigma (DFSS). This study attempts to identify differences and similarities between these methodologies and the connection between them. This comparison is of interest to practitioners that must choose a strategy for their product development as well as to researchers. The aim of both methodologies is to reduce waste and time of development and to raise the quality of a product at the very roots of the product: its development. LPD and DFSS help development managers to structure projects and focus as much as possible on customer expectations and satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit lean manufacturing and process management to review how these have targeted environmental sustainability and determine whether these have the potential to achieve environmental sustainability in small- and medium-sized companies within the freight transport sector.

The methodology for this paper was divided into three steps. The first step involved a narrative literature review, including previously designed search strings. The second step involved a snowball approach, where the identification of new sources departed from previously selected articles. The third step included a completing narrative review to search for the most recent articles published related to the purpose. The analysis was based on the identification of benefits, challenges and the potential of lean and process management to deal with environmental demands among transport companies.

The findings suggest a potential of lean and process management for achieving environmental sustainability, if adapted appropriately. The potential is on the operative and strategic levels, respectively.

This study included two of the concepts from the quality movement from a literature perspective. Hence, there is a need for research to evaluate these results empirically. Additionally, other aspects should be studied within the quality movement for achieving environmental sustainability.

This paper aims to be a basis and a path for further theoretical and empirical research for the quality movement to support environmental sustainability. This paper particularly aims to fill part of the gap in the literature on how the freight transport sector can enhance environmental sustainability in its operations.

Customers from different cultures might have different expectations and perceptions of quality, leading to different levels of satisfaction. Together with the construct and measurement equivalence issues of cross-cultural surveys, this raises the question of the comparability of customer satisfaction measurements across countries. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the survey method of anchoring vignettes as a tool for improving the comparability of customer satisfaction measurements across countries and to shed some light on cultural influences on customer satisfaction measurements.

Based on the models of American Customer Satisfaction Index and European Performance Satisfaction Index, the authors designed and conducted a survey using the method of anchoring vignettes to measure and compare customer satisfaction with mobile phone services in four countries – Costa Rica, Poland, Sweden and Thailand. The survey was carried out with young adults aged 20–30 years, who were mostly university students.

This study demonstrates how anchoring vignettes can be used to mitigate cultural bias in customer satisfaction surveys and to improve both construct and measurement equivalence of the questionnaire. The results show that different conclusions on cross-cultural benchmarking of customer satisfaction would be drawn when using a traditional survey compared to the anchoring vignettes method.

This paper evaluates the survey method of anchoring vignettes as a potential quantitative research method for studying customer satisfaction across countries. The results also contribute to customer satisfaction research as these shed some light onto how culture influences customer satisfaction measurements. The practical implication for firms and managers is that allocating resources among different countries based on traditional customer satisfaction surveys may be misleading.