Lean-kaizen public service: an empirical approach in Spanish local governments

Purpose – Recently, the operations management academic literature has seen articles focusing on the transfer of “lean” thinking or kaizen concept from the private to the public sector. In Spain, during the last 15 years, some local councils have also followed similar improvement initiatives sometimes under the umbrella of “global quality programmes” trying to support continuous process and service improvement. The research question for this article is: How is lean‐kaizen applied in local councils in Spain? The aim is to shed light on how lean thinking is applied in order to improve those services provided to the public by local councils by describing empirical studies in specific Spanish contexts.Design/methodology/approach – The case study approach was adopted in this research. The research design conducted was of the longitudinal and retrospective type.Findings – The results of the empirical evidence show that three techniques related to lean‐kaizen have a direct effect on the processes and management s...

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