Resumen de La contribució de la gestió d'operacions a la sostenibilitat de l'empresa
During the last decades deep changes have taken place in the competitive environment, which have forced companies to focus on strategies that allow them to differentiate themselves from their competitors and gain consumer confidence. One of the aspects of growing interest is the environmental responsibility of the companies. Traditionally, the industrial sector has considered that there was a conflict of interests between the environmental improvements and the economic development of the company. This belief has been endorsed by numerous studies, but in spite of this, other investigations have analyzed the existence of a positive relation between the environmental development and the achievement of objectives of cost and quality. This is because more environmental awareness has begun to be taken and the premise that economic growth and respectful activities with the environment are two compatible terms has been adopted. The present Doctoral Thesis analyzes the relationship between lean management and sustainability, mainly environmental sustainability, and its impact on financial performance at the Catalan level and also from an International point of view. The work has been structured in seven chapters: The first chapter corresponds to the introduction of the Thesis, and establishes the objectives and hypotheses of the investigation. The second chapter describes the reference framework, and the concepts of lean manufacturing and sustainability are introduced. In the third chapter, a systematic review of the literature is applied in order to evaluate the contribution of management to sustainability, mainly environmental, and its impact on the financial performance of the company through the company ' State of the art of research related to the subject. The fourth chapter describes the methodology followed for the investigation. The fifth chapter presents the main results of the statistical study on business behavior in the International sphere. The sixth chapter performs a statistical analysis of the Catalan industrial sector. The final chapter describes the main conclusions derived from the investigation.
