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Recent years have shown an increasing use of lean manufacturing (LM) principles and tools in several industrial sectors. Already a well-established management philosophy, it has shown numerous successful applications even outside production environments. This work presents the application of some LM tools, and the corresponding shift in philosophy, in two Portuguese companies of the food and beverage industries. Main implementation issues are presented and discussed; followed by the results obtained from the application of LM tools in the production system of these companies. Significant gains are obtained in both companies and, more importantly, it instills a continuous improvement culture and increases production flexibility while reducing lead times.

Recent years have shown an increasing use of lean manufacturing (LM) principles and tools in several industrial sectors. Already a well-established management philosophy, it has shown numerous successful applications even outside production environments. This work presents the application of some LM tools, and the corresponding shift in philosophy, in two Portuguese companies of the food and beverage industries. Main implementation issues are presented and discussed; followed by the results obtained from the application of LM tools in the production system of these companies. Significant gains are obtained in both companies and, more importantly, it instills a continuous improvement culture and increases production flexibility while reducing lead times.

Recent years have shown an increasing use of lean manufacturing (LM) principles and tools in several industrial sectors. Already a well-established management philosophy, it has shown numerous successful applications even outside production environments. This work presents the application of some LM tools, and the corresponding shift in philosophy, in two Portuguese companies of the food and beverage industries. Main implementation issues are presented and discussed; followed by the results obtained from the application of LM tools in the production system of these companies. Significant gains are obtained in both companies and, more importantly, it instills a continuous improvement culture and increases production flexibility while reducing lead times.

This paper seeks, by conducting a survey among businesses, to check the hypothesis that the firm's capacity to absorb external technologies and knowledges depends on their internal organization and on how they are organized with regards to their external environment (networks insertion). Our results bear out that absorptive capacity of external knowledge and skills are closely related with businesses organizational patterns. The achievement of a typology make possible to draw up various firm's patterns according to their R&D potential and the quality, degree and length of time of their commitments to their various partners., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper seeks, by conducting a survey among businesses, to check the hypothesis that the firm's capacity to absorb external technologies and knowledges depends on their internal organization and on how they are organized with regards to their external environment (networks insertion). Our results bear out that absorptive capacity of external knowledge and skills are closely related with businesses organizational patterns. The achievement of a typology make possible to draw up various firm's patterns according to their R&D potential and the quality, degree and length of time of their commitments to their various partners., info:eu-repo/semantics/published