Anabela Carvalho Alves

Towards eco-efficient lean production systems

Lean Production has proved itself a worthwhile production strategy in many distinct industries across all regions of the planet by achieving higher levels of production efficiency. Several authors identified that Lean inadvertently has had significant environmental gains. Such achievements are considered of special relevance in a global and highly competitive economy which is progressively both tied-up and driven by an environmental agenda. The main goal of the present study is to enlighten the contribution of Lean for achieving a better environmental performance of production systems and identify this as an emergent business model for supporting eco-efficiency.

Waste identification diagrams

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a very popular tool in lean environments to represent production flows, mapping value stream of a product or family of products, and helps to identify some types of waste. Although very popular, this tool has some limitations as already described in many publications, especially in terms of restrictions in showing most types of waste as well as in its inability to represent various production routes. The purpose of this study is to introduce the waste identification diagram (WID), a new tool to represent production units with its different forms of waste, which overcomes some VSM limitations. The originality of WID comes from the use of its symbols’ dimensions to convey, in a visual and immediate way, relevant information about a production unit. In this paper, WID is applied on a production unit of a lift manufacturer, for testing its performance and comparing it to VSM. The main findings are that WID is in general more effective than VSM in terms of representation of complex production units and in terms of identification of more forms of waste. WID must however overcome some of its limitations such as the lack of information-flow representation and the links to suppliers and clients.

Project based learning in first year, first semester of industrial engineering and management: Some results

This work was financed by National Funds - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project PestOE/EME/UI0252/2011 and SFRH/BD/62116/2009.

Design of a Lean Methodology for an Ergonomic and Sustainable Work Environment in Textile and Garment Industry

This paper presents a methodology to implement Lean Production (LP) in Portuguese Textile and Garment Industry (TGI). Lean Production is a well-known work organizational model being, nowadays, widely implemented in all sort of industries and services companies. LP responds to customers’ demand for on-time delivery of high quality products at reduced costs, through continuous waste elimination (e.g., overproduction, raw materials, energy and water more than necessary, among others). In this methodology is included, besides the Lean tools and techniques, some ergonomics tools in order to assess the ergonomic work conditions and techniques to evaluate the company sustainability. It is expected that, with the involvement of these tools, will allow the implementation of a Lean Production that creates a positive work environment for workers giving special attention to sustainable development.Copyright

Distributed Design of Product Oriented Manufacturing Systems

Manufacturing leanness and agility are requirements of today’s manufacturing systems. Leanness call for a best fit of the manufacturing systems to products, therefore requiring product oriented manufacturing systems (POMS). Manufacturing agility can be achieved through easy systems reconfiguration to fit changing manufacturing requirements, which may mean dynamically configuring POMS. For this a suitable design system is required. Due to complexity of this design, and to the need for using suitable design methods, which may not be available locally, distributed sources of design services can be used. This paper presents and describes a prototype of a Distributed Design system for POMS based on a POMS design methodology and distributed suppliers of design services.

A Framework for Understanding Cellular Manufacturing Systems

Many practical benefits, such as superior quality of products and short manufacturing lead times, are usually associated with Cellular Manufacturing. These and other benefits can lead to important competitive advantages f or companies. However, to fully achieve these benefits there is a need for an evolution from the traditional concept of CM to the more comprehensive one, which we call Product Oriented Manufacturing. Here, systems are dynamically reconfigured for the total manufacturing of complete products, not parts only.

Design of Product Oriented Manufacturing Systems

A Product Oriented Manufacturing System is designed for the manufacture of a product or a family of similar products. POM may be seen as a development of traditional Cellular Manufacturing and tends to involve more than one cell. A POMS may either be physically organized in a single place or be made of distributed manufacturing or servicing units, thus comprising a virtual system. To be efficient, the POMS design should identify design phases and point to the data, methods and tools that should be used to obtain good design solutions. In this paper, one such methodology is proposed, together with an analysis of the conceptual configuration of the cells that are the building blocks of POM systems.

A Project Management Framework for Planning and Executing Interdisciplinary Learning Projects in Engineering Education

Traditional teaching methods being adopted in higher education across European Universities are not contributing effectively to the real needs of today’s world. The current challenges that the world is facing, concerning the new economic paradigms, centred on eco-sustainability along with global and unbalanced competitiveness, demand new answers from the universities. The professionals that universities must create should be prepared with the right set of hard and soft skills so they can rapidly contribute with new energy to the existing enterprises and other organizations.

Lean engineering education: driving content and competence mastery

Recent studies by professional organizations devoted to engineering education, such as Vision 2030 (ASME) and Vision 2025 (ASCE), highlight the need for the restructuring of engineering education. Deficiencies of many engineering graduates include poor systems thinking and systems analysis skills, lack of sensitivity for sustainability issues, poorly developed problem solving skills and lack of training to work in (multi-disciplinary) teams, as well as a lack of leadership, entrepreneurship, innovation, and project management skills. The book’s contents include an analysis of current shortfalls in engineering education and education related to professional practice in engineering. Further, the authors describe desirable improvements as well as advocacy for the use of lean tenets and tools to create a new future for engineering education. This book presents, for the first time, an outside-in lean engineering perspective of how this commonly accepted and widely practiced and adapted engineering perspective can shape the direction in which the engineers of the future are trained and educated. By its very nature, lean engineering demands systems thinking and systems analysis as well as problem solving skills. In this sense, “Lean Engineering” immediately talks to sustainability of operations. Hence, this book adds to the body of knowledge regarding engineering education. It blends the perspectives and expertise of mechanical, industrial and production engineers and academics and the perspective from social sciences on the challenges encountered in engineering education. Because of the unique mix of authors, the book presents a well-rounded perspective of how lean thinking can address shortcomings in engineering education.

Definition of a protocol for implementing lean production methodology in textile and clothing case studies

The authors of this paper would like to express their acknowledgments to the companies and to all people who accepted the challenge to participate in this study. The authors are also grateful to Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Strategic Projects PEstOE/EME/UI0252/2011 and PEst-C/EEI/UI0319/2011, for financial support.