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1 Introduction
After commercial barriers were lowered, competition among companies became more intense, forcing them to seek new forms of competitiveness to survive. Consumers began to demand higher product and service quality at lower prices ([29] Pinto et al. , 2006) and the customer's opinion became the reference of quality. Programs such as Six Sigma have provided competitive advantages to companies, since they have positive impacts on sales and cost reduction ([36] Van Der Wiele et al. , 2010).
Exploring, describing and explaining the problem are important for successful projects. [28] Pepper and Spedding (2010) assert that:
[...] aligning the cultural aspects of Lean with the data driven investigations of Six Sigma holds huge potential in a bid for a genuine and sustainable approach to organizational change and process improvement.
Thus, this study was developed by a multidisciplinary team in order to draw a value stream map of a company's process and implement improvement action plans contained in Six Sigma methodology. The opinion and experience of several staff members, from the operational to the management level, are the basis for the project's success, since changes are more acceptable at operational levels.
Intense competition has forced many companies to implement the pull production system to meet demand, eliminate waste and reduce inventory. The philosophy of the pull production system is to manufacture only what the client really needs, using kanban as the primary tool in the visual management process. All of these tools and processes seek to improve the productive process in order to make production more flexible, reduce inventory and costs and satisfy the customer.
The research problem to be evaluated consists of determining the reasons for the poor customer service index (CSI) in a company division, despite high finished product inventory levels. It is hypothesized here that this is a result of the lack of knowledge regarding the process as a whole and non-standardization.
The article is divided into six sections. This introductory section is followed by Section 2, a theoretical summary of the subjects discussed. Section 3 presents methodological aspects, while Sections 4 and 5 show a case study in a division of 3M Brazil and the results obtained, respectively. Finally, Section 6 gives conclusions, limitations and suggestions for future studies.
2 Research...