Abstract
Understanding how VMI benefits serve lean purposes in healthcare and why its outcomes can be difficult to achieve in healthcare settings is the main purpose of this study. An in?depth case study of VMI is presented in the perspective of the downstream member, a public general multi?site hospital, operating as a small scale consolidated service centre in terms of material management, exploring such dimensions as: VMI benefits, risks, barriers and enablers. Despite some unawareness of VMI benefits in healthcare, it can present a waste reduction solution not only in costs but in the quality of care for freeing clinical professionals to clinical tasks, among other savings. The multiple benefits are better explored, as in any relationship building, by investing in partnership creation and overcoming the idiosyncratic barriers of the healthcare sector. Although findings of a single case study are difficult to generalize, the protocol and methodology presented allow replication in other units of analysis with the same inclusion criteria. This paper brings the lean deployment discussion out of the organization's boundaries, showing the interconnections and pointing to the need for future work that would allow healthcare managers to build a lean supply chain. By considering VMI an outsourcing alternative, this paper identifies the lean thinking intent behind such options and enhances the idiosyncratic difficulties in full deployment in the healthcare sector, a less studied setting. © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract
Considering lean thinking inside and beyond the organisation's boundaries, in the extended supply chain, this paper aims to fill a literature gap clearly stating some outsourcing practices as lean practices and establishing a deployment evolution parallel between both practices. A literature review was carried out collecting cases of lean deployment in healthcare, from both scientific and grey literature. Cases were classified according to lean deployment taxonomy in healthcare settings, showing some differences in lean journey stages in 15 countries. There is an alignment between SCM thinking in healthcare and lean thinking that places a SCM decision as outsourcing as a lean practice serving not only strategic intent but solving operational efficiency. There is a match between different outsourcing drivers (transactional, strategic and transformational) and lean maturity levels. The main constraint to deployment of both lean and outsourcing practices are cultural differences. Understanding lean and outsourcing different deployment maturity levels under the national cultural umbrella can open new perspectives to study lean sustainability factors and better outsourcing relationships in healthcare organisations. This paper presents a merger between the state?of?the art of both lean and outsourcing practices in healthcare settings and suggests an outsourcing and lean evolving pathway. © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract
This paper explores the changes in value added (VA) of a sample of schools for cohorts of students finishing secondary education between 2005 and 2008. VA estimates are based on distance measures obtained from DEA models. These measures are computed for each pupil in each school, and evaluate the distance between the school frontier in a given year and a pooled frontier comprising all schools analysed. The school VA is then computed by aggregating the VA scores for the cohort of pupils attending that school in a given year. The ratio between VA estimates for two consecutive cohorts, that attended the school in different years, is taken as the index of VA change. However, the evolution of school performance over time should consider not only the movements of the school frontier, but should also take into account other effects, such as the proximity of the students to the best-practices, represented by the school frontier, observed over time. For that purpose we developed an enhanced Malmquist index to evaluate the evolution of school performance over time. One of the components of the Malmquist index proposed measures VA change, and the other measures the ability of all school students to move closer to their own school best practices over time. The approach developed is applied to a sample of Portuguese secondary schools.

Abstract
Companies are increasingly including their corporate social responsibility into their business strategy. The environmental issues assume here a priority role. In order to get a balance in economic, social and environmental trade-offs, companies need to consider multiple objectives, namely related to the allocation of resources and investments, which can cause contradictory opinions among diverse stakeholders. Companies should incorporate into the decision-making process tangible and intangible elements, identifying and structuring objectives in a consistent way, in order to choose sustainable options for the company and create compromises between stakeholders. The main motivation of this paper is to present a methodology or framework to support decision-making and appraisal of corporate environmental strategies and subsequent management approaches. In order to gain a closer view over the proposed approach, we will present the preliminary results illustrated with examples from an ongoing case study within a public passenger transport company. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.

Abstract
The liberalisation of the European air transport market has introduced new dynamics in the airport industry. In recent decades, airports evolved from infrastructure providers in a monopolistic context, to commercially orientated enterprises in a competitive environment. Current studies of airport strategic management lack a comprehensive perspective that enables airport operators to best identify the opportunities created by such dynamics. This paper analyses an airport as a multi-service firm that interacts with a network of stakeholders - the airport business network - to deliver several service packages to different groups of customers. An integrated conceptual framework was developed to aid academics and practitioners in the appraisal and design of competitive strategies for airports. Such framework covers a clear gap in existing literature, partly due to the fact that current perspectives on airport management fail to address the complexity of the industry in the present competitive environment.

Abstract
In recent years several countries have set up policies that allow exchange of kidneys between two or more incompatible patient-donor pairs. These policies lead to what is commonly known as kidney exchange programs. The underlying optimization problems can be formulated as integer programming models. Previously proposed models for kidney exchange programs have exponential numbers of constraints or variables, which makes them fairly difficult to solve when the problem size is large. In this work we propose two compact formulations for the problem, explain how these formulations can be adapted to address some problem variants, and provide results on the dominance of some models over others. Finally we present a systematic comparison between our models and two previously proposed ones via thorough computational analysis. Results show that compact formulations have advantages over non-compact ones when the problem size is large.