Lean Management i aplicacio de noves tecnologies al sector serveis. Lean IT en restauració.

Abstract

This paper examines how the Lean Management can improve processes in catering companies. It presents the main organizational and management difficulties of these businesses and identifies current problems to finally contribute with solutions based on the Lean concept. The aim is to apply this management model from the traditional production chains to small catering business. This project was done under a basic perspective in terms of technology and has more impact on management and organizational concepts. The work can be divided into four parts: The first part describes the project structure and what are the reasons that led to do it. Next, there is a brief historical introduction of catering business. It continues with an introduction to the Lean Management and the definition of the main concepts used on this project. The second part is the environment description and the research of the current sector status. It shows some figures that represent the impact that the application of this project would achive. Then it presents the impact that ICT and Lean Method have on catering business.The main part of the project consists on applying different Lean tools to observe, describe and analyze a case study. These tools will be used to improve various existing difficulties. In the last part a list of four technology based improvement proposals is presented. All these proposals could be applied using Lean IT and its feasibility it is also been described in this part. Finally, we explain the contribution of the application of the Lean Method. To sum up, it shows a summary based on quantified indicators to analyze the impact, not only on the case study but in any similar business as well.