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The Lean construction philosophy has been welcomed by numerous companies in Colombia for a little more than a decade. The Last Planner System (LPS) is among the implemented tools found, a planning and control system that seeks to accomplish a continuous workflow. The system implementation results vary from one company to another, and there is no investigation to date that shows the diagnosis of the adoption of this tool in the country. This paper aims to illustrate the degree of implementation and functioning of the LPS from different perspectives found in sixteen Colombian construction companies. Data collection was carried out through non-participant observation during the weekly planning meetings, surveys conducted to construction professionals, supervisors, subcontractors and labor, and a semi-structured direct interview with the managers of the Lean area in the companies. Analysis of compiled information shows multiple ways of applying this tool, conceptual and practical failures, and a lack of training and permanent feedback that does not allow to be a part of the corporate culture were all identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the review of three main existing agile approaches: Scrum, Lean Software Development and Kanban, which served as the basis for the development of a proposal for a new approach in Agile development. To achieve this, a description of each agile approach to software development and a comparison of their strengths and weaknesses are made. Then, the new proposal is established based on the integration of the three approaches, defining a set of metrics and developing a case study to evaluate the integration and obtain quantitative and qualitative data. The results obtained from the case study proved to be quite positive because it allowed us to comprehensively evaluate the new approach. These results represent a promising start to continue working in this line of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market has required of the organizations, efficiency, effectiveness, creativity and agility, to be competitive and have their strategies aimed at the sustainability of business defined. In this context, logistics emerges as one of the important links in corporate strategies. However, in prior reading about this topic, there is a lack in the literature about the organization and evaluation of internal logistics. Looking to fill this gap, this paper aims to identify the importance of evaluating internal logistics, identifying its component parts and how they are structured and measured, based on the literature and answers of experts in this field. The degree of importance of these parts will be evaluated by three companies, using a Likert scale. The identification of the component parts of the internal logistics, the weights of the priorities of these parts, and its performance index are showed, which enable the companies to improve their competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The links between knowledge, information and decision making in tourism industry have been addressed mainly at the level of tourist destinations, however there have been described deficiencies in the study of these relationships at the level of business organizations that interact in those destinations. The fact is shown in the weak production of academic articles that help to explain the decision-making and knowledge management in these entities, where although its importance is recognized there are factors that affect the development and implementation of both processes such as the lack of systemic approaches, models and methodologies. In this paper a theoretical analysis of the research topics is done, showing its evolution and current trends, which supported the development of a conceptual framework, and dimensions from which a procedure is proposed to study the alignment of decision making with knowledge management in business organizations related to tourism. The procedure is applied in entities placed on Holguin Tourist Destination located to the east of Cuba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a simultaneous use of simulation and optimization techniques for the logistic operation planning is presented, specifically aimed to support the decision making processes related with fleet size determination in the supply--distribution process. The study is developed for a Cuban company dedicated to the transportation of goods and warehousing services. The implementation of the proposed tools enabled suggesting the optimal number of trucks to be used, considering minimization of the idle time of trucks and maximization of the customer service level. Experimental results show a significant improvement regarding the lead time reduction and the increment of order fulfillment for the customers of the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several maturity models have risen in the area of Business Intelligence (BI), with different origins and purposes. Within this diversity, there is currently no quantitative and / or qualitative comparison of them that give arguments to select and use one of them as reference in improving BI maturity for an organization. In this paper the method of study of similarities and standards (MESME) and the technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to characterize and compare a set of maturity models in selected BI applies. With the application of the method MESME identified and compared the similarities between the different models of BI maturity. On other side, with the implementation of the DEA technique, a quantitative characterization of the ability of different models in a given phase was obtained to transform inputs into outputs, at different levels of maturity for a set of models analyzed. The result of this research was to obtain a quantitative and qualitative comparison of a set of BI maturity models. This will allow selecting one of them as a basis for example for the development of a methodological guide focused on implementing improvements in BI maturity for an organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]