A melhoria contínua como espaço de criação de soluções: a implementação do Lean Seis Sigma em uma empresa de mineração

Abstract

A company wishes to improve its processes in order to reduce operational costs and, so, it adopts a continuous improvement methodology, recognized in the global market. After providing human and financial resources for the success of the endeavour, everything seems favorable so that the motivation for the methodology use permeate through the company and the results naturally arrive. But that doesn't become true. In fact, not all the problems identified by the methodology are solved. But why does that happen? The purpose of this dissertation is to answer this question based on the analysis of the activity of the employees in charge of conducting Lean Six Sigma projects in a multinational mining company. The demand for this study emerged during the performance of the author as an analyst for continuous improvement and originated from the realization that the conduct of these projects was difficult on the employees to whom such a task was attributed. The research shows that the current models of process improvement designed by high performance companies to deal with the pressures of intense competition have a discreet problem-solving, analytical approach, very little adherent to the reality of employees and unlikely susceptible to their adoption without any kind of adaptation. Since the empirical study enlighted the distance between the actual work of improving a process and the representations of the analytical models proposed by the governance of the company, it was observed that in the method adaptations reigns the interpretive approach. In an antagonistic way to the analytical approach, the interpretive approach encourages communication across organizational boundaries and eliminates formal decision-making procedures until they are necessary. The contradictions found in the research field allowed to assess the practicality of adopting a method and finally to propose ways to encourage the formation of spaces where both approaches interpretive and analytical can be applied to improve ambiguous processes: solutions creation spaces