Search results

The performance management process in health care is far behind compared to the manufacturing and service industries. Although nowadays the health care organizations are able to deal with a greater rank diseases, their cost, quality and delivery has essentially not improved significantly, and the difference with the other industries even seems to have increased. As opposed to this situation health care has a tremendous opportunity to deploy lean principles to reduce internal/external costs, improve patient safety, increase profits, reduce litigation and decrease the dependence on Government and Insurance. The application of these principles is being facilitated by the use of the new technologies. A new technology allowing personnel to constantly "see" what's happening with regards to patients schedule, backlog, workflow, inventory levels, resource utilization, quality, etc., is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The aim of this paper is to analyse the benefits that can be derived from the joint use of lean principles and RFID technology in health care.

Firms are increasingly aware of environmental degradation and this has led many of them to include "quality, safety and protecting the environment" among their competitive priorities. This also involves large capital investments aimed at reducing the environmental impact of their manufacturing activities. This study suggests a method for estimating the return of manufacturing investments with environmental effects (costs and benefits). It considers the value of the asset being preserved as a consequence of a firm's social responsibility. The practical case studied is Huelva's industrial area.

AbstractDespite the significance of materiality, its implementation has been perceived as ambiguous, opaque, and heterogeneous. This study focuses on analyzing materiality reporting among companies that utilize GRI and are listed on the Spanish stock exchange between 2018 and 2021. First, it examines the disclosure of materiality analysis by introducing a materiality disclosure assessment index (MDA) and exploring its determinants. Additionally, it investigates the alignment of material topics with GRI Topic Standards, analyzing the cross‐cutting nature of material topics. Our results indicate that MDA reached slightly over half of its maximum value. We found evidence that MDA is positively associated with membership in the IBEX 35, as well as with five out of the seven industries comprising the stock index. Furthermore, the years of disclosure experience in two industries significantly influenced MDA. Companies considered 20% of material topics as cross‐cutting, while another 20% had no direct correspondence with GRI standards. This study builds upon previous empirical findings on GRI materiality disclosure and provides valuable insights for research, practice, and standard setting.