Nowadays, there has been a gradual growth in the supply of food retail stores, which implies an increase in competitiveness in this sector. In view of this increase in competitiveness, groups belonging to the food retail have to adopt strategies in order to achieve competitive advantage, while also needing to adapt to the demands of consumers. It is at this point that lean principles and techniques are fundamental and can be hugely successful when implemented in food retail, but there are a number of barriers that hinder the implementation of this methodology in this sector. In view of this problem, the present investigation aims to analyze the type of obstacles that emerge at the time of the adoption of lean in food retail stores, as well as to understand the changes that occurred in this sector under the effect of the covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the importance of this concept in this same sector in remote times. In order to achieve these two objectives, a qualitative and exploratory investigation was carried out, in the form of survey, to understand the real context in twelve different food retail stores, by conducting semi-structured interviews with the heads of each store, and also the aid of direct observations. In the end, it was noticed that the lean concept is not widely known by all respondents and, consequently, its adoption is not noticeable in all stores present in the study. It was possible to collect a set of problems that lead to this adoption not being so easy, where related issues are mentioned, such as the lack of organized communication within the structures, volatility in the demand for this type of service and also resistance to change on the part of responsible. Some wastes were also identified that with simple lean practices it would be possible to eliminate and, already in the final stage of the investigation, it was verified the importance that lean can have in this type of service, namely in remote times such as the covid-19 pandemic, in order to simplify the processes and benefit the performance in the final sale to the customer.
Date of Award | 13 Jul 2021 |
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Original language | Portuguese |
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Awarding Institution | - Universidade Católica Portuguesa
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Supervisor | Jorge Julião (Supervisor) |
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- Lean
- Lean tools
- Difficulties in implementation
- Food retail
- Pandemic
- Covid-19
Implementação de Lean Thinking no retalho alimentar: barreiras e efeito covid-19
Barroso, P. J. V. (Student). 13 Jul 2021
Student thesis: Master's Thesis