Operational Excellence 5.0: Paving the Way to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Ibero-American Countries

Closes:
Journal
International Journal of Lean Six Sigma
Guest editor(s)
Daniel Luiz De Mattos Nascimento, Rodrigo Goyannes Gusmão Caiado, Luiz Felipe Scavarda, Jose Arturo Garza-Reyes,
This special issue aims to explore how advanced frameworks and practices in operational excellence can serve as enablers for sustainable development, with a specific focus on the unique challenges and opportunities within Ibero-American contexts.

​​
Introduction

While extensive research has been conducted on Industry 4.0 and sustainability in operations and supply chain management (OSCM), there is a notable gap in studies addressing the industry 5.0 paradigm and its potential to facilitate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while maintaining operational excellence, particularly within the manufacturing and service sectors in Ibero-American countries. In the modern business landscape, operational excellence is viewed as a holistic approach that focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations' operations in alignment with the UN SDGs. 

Therefore, this Special Issue (SI) aims to address the gap mentioned above by considering theoretical and empirical research that embraces Human-Centricity, Resilience, and Sustainability within operational excellence, herein labelled Operational Excellence 5.0, to support the SDGs with implications for academics, practitioners, and policymakers. The SI is specifically designed to attract high-quality manuscripts from leading scholars in the OSCM field. We encourage submissions that address at least one of the 17 UN SDGs within the scope of the promising arena of Ibero-American countries, paving the way for a new era of Operational Excellence. 

Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are welcome, including design science research, systematic literature reviews, action research, case studies, surveys, multicriteria approaches, optimization and simulation modelling, machine learning techniques, and data analytics. The use of well-known OSCM theories, as well as theories borrowed from other disciplines, is encouraged. This also applies to theory building and midrange theorizing.​ 


List of topic areas

  • Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM)
  • Lean Six Sigma; Industry 4.0; Operational Excellence
  • UN's Sustainable Development Goals
  • Circular Economy
  • Interoperability
  • Industry 5.0
  • openBIM
  • Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI)


Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijlss


Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ijlss#jlp_author_guidelines

Submissions open: 1st February 2025
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 1 October 2025