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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a method for assisting micro and small companies of the industrial sector with the adoption of Lean practices. Design/methodology/approach The paper outlines the method construction steps, which used a design science research approach. Findings This research led to the structuring of a method for implementing Lean Manufacturing tools in micro and small companies of the industrial sector. The developed method contributed to the knowledge in Lean Manufacturing by systematizing its tools in a heuristic approach that can be applied to an operation using overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) as a guiding indicator. Practical implications This method can be used to guide the implementation of Lean tools in SMEs industries. Originality/value The originality of this paper lies in the adoption of an operation-focused approach only (rather than an approach that begins with the mapping of an entire process) and the use of OEE as the basis for prioritization of improvements to be performed and operational control.
In April 2020, we developed a COVID-19 transmission model used as part of RAND's web-based COVID-19 decision support tool that compares the effects of different nonpharmaceutical public health interventions (NPIs) on health and economic outcomes. An interdisciplinary approach informed the selection and use of multiple NPIs, combining quantitative modeling of the health/economic impacts of interventions with qualitative assessments of other important considerations (e.g., cost, ease of implementation, equity). We previously published a description of our approach as a RAND report describing how the epidemiological model, the economic model, and a systematic assessment of NPIs informed the web-tool. This paper provides further details of our model, describes extensions that we made to our model since April, presents sensitivity analyses, and analyzes periodic NPIs. Our findings suggest that there are opportunities to shape the tradeoffs between economic and health outcomes by carefully evaluating a more comprehensive range of reopening policies. We consider strategies that periodically switch between a base NPI level and a higher NPI level as our working example.
The COVID-19 pandemic required significant public health interventions from local governments. Although nonpharmaceutical interventions often were implemented as decision rules, few studies evaluated the robustness of those reopening plans under a wide range of uncertainties. This paper uses the Robust Decision Making approach to stress-test 78 alternative reopening strategies, using California as an example. This study uniquely considers a wide range of uncertainties and demonstrates that seemingly sensible reopening plans can lead to both unnecessary COVID-19 deaths and days of interventions. We find that plans using fixed COVID-19 case thresholds might be less effective than strategies with time-varying reopening thresholds. While we use California as an example, our results are particularly relevant for jurisdictions where vaccination roll-out has been slower. The approach used in this paper could also prove useful for other public health policy problems in which policymakers need to make robust decisions in the face of deep uncertainty.
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