Scoping Review of Kaizen and Green Practices: State of the Art and Future Directions

Abstract

Given the importance that environmental management is acquiring, the main aim of this work is to know what the state of the field kaizen and green practices is at present. A systematic narrative review is conducted in accordance with the PRISMA Statement. Two databases (Web of Science and Scopus) were searched. Finally, after applying the defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, 19 documents were analyzed. Based on the results, it might be concluded that, despite the growing interest in the relationship between kaizen and green practices, this is a topic in the early stages of development, with a clear predominance of case studies. It is, therefore, necessary to develop more research on this kaizen and green issue as improving environmental management is undeniably becoming a must in today’s competitive environment. For instance, more research is needed on the application of kaizen tools as results obtained so far seem not to be conclusive. Additionally, more academic and rigorous studies should be developed on this topic as many of the analyzed papers seem to be clearly created for dissemination among practitioners, some of them lacking the traditional academic structure and scientific method during their development.

The Role of Value Stream Mapping in Healthcare Services: A Scoping Review

“…One of the main goals pursued with the VSM is to improve some key performance indicators (KPI) of the organization. In this work, we are going to group them into three main pillars: operational, environmental and social indicators [25][26][27][28][29]. For example, for operational indicators, among others, the following have been used [24,[29][30][31][32]: clinical quality, cost reduction, patient safety, organizational responsiveness, lead time, delivery performance, process time, inventory level, equipment performance, reducing delays, error rate, service quality and patient satisfaction, and for environmental indicators [26,30]: waste insofar as they cannot aggregate outcomes and the VSM intervention is rarely presented separately.…”

“…Our systematic review intends to answer some questions inspired in the field research conducted by the authors of the present work and of previously published research works [23,25,51,52]:…”

Empowerment and Employee Well-Being: A Mediation Analysis Study

“…Continuing an ongoing academic trend [1][2][3][4][5], a body of work has focused on kaizen or improvement practices. Some of these are centered on healthcare settings [6][7][8][9][10][11], another article analyzes the relationship between kaizen and environmental management, the implementation of cleaner production and green practices [12], and one more analyzes the effects on sustainable product development [13].…”

Data Set on the Use of Continuous Improvement Programs in Companies From Open-Ended Questions

“…Thus, despite their reputation and the benefits demonstrated in continuous improvement programmes, both economically (Appelbaum et al, 2000;Mathieu et al, 2008;Jaca-Garcia and Santos-Garcia, 2009;Subramony, 2009;Van Aken et al, 2010;Chalmers, 2013;Prieto and Pérez-Santana, 2014;Carnerud et al, 2018;de Souza et al, 2018;Sanchez-Ruiz and Blanco, 2019;Sánchez-Ruiz et al, 2019;Sanchez-Ruiz et al, 2020;Paipa-Galeano et al, 2020) and in terms of employee satisfaction and commitment (García et al, 2013(García et al, , 2014Jurburg et al, 2017;Stelson et al, 2017;Alvarado-Ramírez et al, 2018;Paganelli et al, 2018;Sakowski and Marcinkiewicz, 2019;Sanchez-Ruiz and Blanco, 2019;Scharf et al, 2019;Paipa-Galeano et al, 2020;Tortorella et al, 2020;Marin-Garcia and Bonavia, 2021), reports of unsuccessful application or management attempts are recurring (Easton and Jarrell, 1998;Bessant et al, 2001;Hackman and Coutu, 2009;McLean et al, 2017;Rantala et al, 2018;Sunder and Prashar, 2020;Tavana et al, 2021), and also, the effects of these initiatives on long-term benefits and their sustainability remain debated (Jaca et al, 2012;Jurburg et al, 2016;Mendez and Vila-Alonso, 2018;Gutierrez-Gutierrez ...…”

“…In this context there is a need for developing studies and measurements regarding continuous improvement and its interrelationships (Bateman, 2005;Hackman and Coutu, 2009;Bonavia et al, 2015;Sanchez-Ruiz and Blanco, 2019;Marin-Garcia et al, 2020;Sanchez-Ruiz et al, 2020;Marin-Garcia and Bonavia, 2021); correctly plan the implementation of these programs, as unsuccessful implementation cause organizations to waste resources, fall short of performance objectives, rework designs, and extend time to market and by considering the right issues and the facilitators and barriers perceived by workers, enable organizations to better understand how to plan for and manage them to achieve the improvement expected, both in terms of economic performance (Hackman and Coutu, 2009;Subramony, 2009) and employee commitment and well-being (Saa Perez et al, 2001;de Koeijer et al, 2014;Mendez and Vila-Alonso, 2018).…”