Operational Excellence and Quality Improvement in Northern Africa

Submit your paper here!

Introduction

This special issue highlights the current state of OPEX in North Africa, looking at several different tools and practices, in several types of processes and organizations, giving examples and learning from real applications in businesses and in public organizations. Furthermore, this issue also aims to cover research projects aiming to enhance performance and better ways of working in African organizations adopting traditional or innovative OPEX approaches. 
The objective of this Special Issue is, therefore, to invite academics and practitioners to contribute with research that enables a better understanding of the integration of applications and methods to enhance OPEX in the context of Northern Africa. Furthermore, this Special Issue also presents innovative research projects aiming for better ways of working in organisations, for a more sustainable future with more societal satisfaction.

List of Topic Areas

In particular, practical and original contributions investigating sustainable OE strategies in the I4.0 era addressing the following themes are sought: 

• What Operational Excellence means in North Africa 
• Differences and similarities to other countries 
• The tradition of Quality Management and Operational Excellence in North Africa
• Current state of OE work in Moroccan businesses
• Practices and results 
• Current state of OE work in Moroccan public organizations 
• Practices and results - How to work with OE in North Africa (focusing on one or more of: customer/society satisfaction, process management, base decisions on facts, continual improvement, management commitment and systems thinking) 
• Lessons learned from success and failure 
• Cultural aspects 
• Quality culture, national culture 
• Innovation and digitalization; what have been done and ideas for the future 
• Innovations in OE practices that enable the effective deployment of I4.0 technology for better corporate performance 
• Motivation and barriers of adoption of OE in the era of Industry 4.0/Digital Transformation 
• Digitalisation tools to support OE 
• Role of digital technologies in quality and performance improvement 
• Effectiveness of I4.0 technologies for green and lean manufacturing practices 
• Integration of Industry 4.0 with OE methodologies in the service industry for improved service performance

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/02/2024 
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/05/2024