Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The digital era represents significant changes in the design of IT projects with an emphasis on digital infrastructure, especially in terms of investment and professional qualification, which requires, in Brazil, the creation of specific lines of financing by government development agencies. The creation of demonstration platforms could be an effective initiative to stimulate the dissemination of the concept and the establishment of partnerships between customers and suppliers of new technologies. On the other hand, and particularly for the consumer market, corporations can create new business models and modify their relationships with their consumers, users and even competitors. In fact, today, "Thing Internet" has come to significantly modify the paradigms of perception, production and distribution of the capitalist world. This article discusses, covering and understanding the main reasons for the existence of this gap between theory and practice regarding digital manufacturing and adjacencies, the perspectives of technological innovations in the digital era specifically in Brazil. Its content is the result of a bibliographical review carried out from April to June 2016.

The organizations maintain excessive inventories as a way to anticipate the customer's need, taking, this way, competitive advantage. On the other hand, the lack of stocks can stop assembly lines; change the production schedule; increase costs and harm the marketing planning. However, there are costs in relation to these inventories;therefore, set an appropriate policy stock management is a critical factor for the success of a company, in addition to obtaining sustainable competitive advantage in the long term. Considered by many as the basis for managing the supply chain, inventory management depends on clear definitions for the following questions: how much to ask, when to ask, how much to keep in stock and where to find the stock. Therefore, there must be a balance in relation to demand and stock supply. Increased market competitiveness forces companies to lower their stock costs and may result in loss of orders due to lack of product. This paper describes the process of forecasting demand, and the methods of analysis forecasting as a tool to reduce costs by simulating the methods of demand forecasting in order to improve the level of stock. Thus, a case study was elaborated in the ABC Company, which acts in the imported PPE business for analyzing the process and simulating the techniques of demand forecasting.The results presented in the case study were satisfactory actually observed divergence between the process applied before the company and applied studies directly on demand obtained with this assertiveness in the forecast.

This paper aims to conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify how to configure the publications that relate WCM and Lean Production issues. Therefore, a search on the Brazilian metasearch portal called CAPES Periodicals was conducted focusing on articles of the last five years. They were identified after screening and filtering a total of 42 articles, which were analyzed. The construction of the network analysis has identified that the issues are still in an initial phase of association, with the characteristic part of decentralizes networks, with some points of greatest association. It was also identified that the theme Lean Production has greater representation between the two topics due its higher use by authors.

At the competitive market of service delivery in logistics, the companies seek to improve the quality in the provision of services. Thus this article had as objective to study the services quality assessment from a logistics company, proposing a review of the SERVQUAL model, adapted to measure the satisfaction of its main customers. For this it was made a conceptual map about themes, service features, logistics services, customer satisfaction and quality of services, through the exploratory techniques, bibliographical of qualitative nature. The adopted procedure for the research was a case analysis, whose collection of data was based in authors’ auto ethnography. The research showed that the model of customers satisfaction questionnaire used by the studied object company, did not meet the main structural dimensions of SERVQUAL model. The main results were fault identification at the customer’s feedback process and the proposal of a new questionnaire model, contributing for the company's services quality's efficiency.

The study evaluated the queuing system in Blue Meadows restaurant with a view to determining its operating characteristics and to improve customers’ satisfaction during waiting time using the lens of queuing theory. Data was obtained from a fast food restaurant in the University of Benin. The data collected was tested to show if it follows a Poisson and exponential distribution of arrival and service rate using chi square goodness of fit. A 95% confidence interval level was used to show the range of customers that come into the system at an hour time frame and the range of customers served at an hour time frame. Using the M/M/s model, the arrival rate, service rate, utilization rate, waiting time in the queue and the probability of customers likely balking from the restaurant was derived. The arrival rate (λ) at Blue Meadows restaurant was about 40 customers per hour, while the service rate was about 22 customers per hour per server. The number of servers present in the system was two. The average number of customers in the system in an hour window was 40 customers with a utilization rate of 0.909. The paper concludes with a discussion on the benefits of performing queuing analysis to a restaurant.

This study brings an implementation of a metaheuristic procedure to solve the Number Partitioning Problem (NPP), which is a classic NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The presented problem has applications in different areas, such as: logistics, production and operations management, besides important relationships with other combinatorial problems. This paper aims to perform a comparative analysis between the proposed algorithm with others metaheuristics using a group of instances available on the literature. Implementations of constructive heuristics, local search and metaheuristics ILS with path relinking as mechanism of intensification and diversification were made in order to improve solutions, surpassing the others algorithms.

The objective of this work is to analyse how conflict gives way to entrepreneurial innovation – before the non-compatibility between Universalism-particularism at the subsidiary of a transnational company located in Mexico. The evidence was obtained by means of a survey, interviews, analysis of electronic mails, minutes of work, project documents and systemic observation. For this research the SPSS and the root cause analysis were required. Conflict derived from non-compatibility between Universalism and Particularism lead to a more accurate decision making process.

This article explores the topicality of Porter’s generic strategies, assessing about their applicability on two specific automotive industry projects: The Smart and the New Beetle.  After performing a documentation analysis on these two projects, it was concluded that both of them may be considered avoidable strategic mistakes as they show the risks of higher differentiation that is not being paid by the customer, no matter how if it is about recognized brands or icon products. Hazards and risks, like big losses and negative margins, are applicable to every firm.   This is a qualitative investigation with a not experimental and transversal research design.