Smart green supply chain management: a configurational approach for reaching sustainable performance goals and decreasing COVID-19 impact

Smart Supply Chain has been evolving with the use of base technologies and front-end technologies, allowing the development of digital solutions for companies. Besides these technological aspects, companies should create a digital transformation strategy to boost the development of their Smart Supply Chain. Even though creating a Smart Supply Chain is vital for companies enabling their competitiveness in the market, some companies are also applying green supply chain internal and external practices to recover from the COVID-19 outbreak. These green practices are essential for companies to guide their supply chain activities to ensure competitive advantage. We discuss when companies develop Smart Supply Chain to meet Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM), a Smart GSCM is configured to reach sustainable performance goals and to decrease COVID-19 impacts. © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Best practices for covid-19 test process in a hospital emergency department

Detection tests for COVID-19 are important to mitigate its spread. However, it is not yet clear what are the best practices for its realization. This paper aims to propose best practices to avoid possible failures in the points of contact of the samples collection for Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) process in an emergency department of a hospital for the care of patients who are suspected or diagnosed with the new coronavirus. For this purpose, we performed a process mapping of the RT-PCR collection process using the Service Blueprint tool to identify the points of contact between the patients and the hospital staff. Thus, we identified the possible failures in these points, with the process actors, and we prioritized them according to their perception about Gravity, Urgency, and Tendency matrix. Our results show that the most critical failures are related to the information and communication between the process actors and the patients. In this way, improvements were proposed related to the standardization, information material, continued training, development of specialized teams, creation of protocols, and use of information technology. © IEOM Society International.