José Dinis-Carvalho

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.

Development of competences while solving real industrial interdisciplinary problems: a successful cooperation with industry

The development of projects in industrial context constitutes an exceptional opportunity for engineering students to develop competences expected by the labour market. Therefore, the adoption of this type of interaction within engineering curricula is highly recommended, not only at the end of the degree, but also in the previous years. The main purpose of this paper is to present and analyse a Project-Based Learning (PBL) semester in which six teams of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students integrate different areas of knowledge, while solving real problems of five companies, emphasizing the technical solutions developed by the students and the feedback provided by the companies. Students’ feedback will be also addressed. The main outcomes of this study reveal that most of the technical solutions lie in areas of Lean applications and ergonomic improvement of workplaces. Companies were very pleased with the results of this type of University-Business Cooperation (UBC).

Redesign of the production system: A hard decision-making process

Lean production is an organizational methodology that has been successfully adopted by many companies aiming to improve their performance. Nevertheless, the implementation of lean involves challenges and problems that many companies are not prepared for. The main challenge is the need for a cultural change (mindset). A very common problem is the decision-making process on the need to redefine the production system. In fact, the production systems of many companies are obsolete and therefore not suited to the current market needs, but, even though, the decision to proceed to the indispensable redesign is not easy. This paper presents and analyzes eight industrial projects involving the redesign of production systems, providing a discussion on the main enablers and inhibitors of the referred decision-making process. Each project was developed by a student, in the ambit of his/her Master Thesis on Industrial Engineering and Management, under supervision of one of the authors.

Project Cell: Cellular Organization of the Building Design Process

The construction sector plays an important role in most economies; therefore, any waste reduction in a buildings life cycle will result in a significant benefit to the economy. It is at the building design phase that most costs and wastes are defined for the entire building life cycle. Moreover, many forms of waste are also accumulated during the design phase itself. This article presents a new approach for organizing and managing the building design phase in a more effective and efficient way. This approach, called project cell, promotes concurrent engineering and lean management principles to achieve better performance during the design of a building. The project cell approach was implemented in the design process of a generic kindergarten project for the Brazilian Ministry of Education. In this case study, the implementation of project cell resulted in better productivity in the building design process as well as more effective building designs when compared with the traditional departmentalized approaches. The authors believe that introducing project cell may be valuable contribution to the Construction Engineering Management (CEM) body of knowledge. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000590.

Performance enhancing in the manufacturing industry: An improvement KATA application

As manufacturing firms (MFs) experience increasing competition in the global economy, it is vital to seek competitive advantage through the continuous improvement of performance within manufacturing processes. This requires a systematic approach to enhance performance by engaging staff at all levels to effectively take part in performance-enhancing efforts. The implementation of Toyota Kata has been proven to be highly successful for continuous improvement in a MF. Toyota Kata provides a holistic system of methods for improving performance, which contains processes and behavioral patterns for strategically aligned goal setting, problem solving, coaching, management and training. It is a simple and human factor focused approach, which covers the management of performance improvement efforts. This manuscript presents a case study performed in a wooden frames manufacturing firm for the implementation of Improvement Kata. Lead time has been selected as the performance indicator. The study describes current challenges, Improvement Kata implementation methodology, and the lead time improvement results.

MOVING FROM JOB-SHOP TO PRODUCTION CELLS WITHOUT LOSING FLEXIBILITY: A CASE STUDY FROM THE WOODEN FRAMES INDUSTRY

Cellular production is usually seen as a hybrid approach between job-shop and flow-line paradigms, reducing the major disadvantages of these two paradigms: the low productivity of job-shops and the low flexibility (in terms of products’ variety) of the flow-lines. This paper describes the implementation of a production cell in a production unit of wood- framed pictures and mirrors, which was originally configured as a traditional job-shop, without losing the necessary flexibility to face market demand and simultaneously increasing the production unit’s performance. By implementing a highly flexible cell, very significant improvements were expected for the system’s overall performance and the quality of the products. These expectations were met, and the implementation was successful, as demonstrated by the results presented.

Lean Education at University of Minho: aligning and pulling the right requirements geared on competitive industries

Modern day engineering practitioners are required to be skilful and knowledgeable in Lean Manufacturing, so that a mindset of perfection and efficiency is effectively established to foster competitive and mature industries. The alignment of what the universities teach and what the industries need, should be ceaselessly pursued so that the right professional competences are developed and thoroughly applied. In this context, a number of competences is ought to be developed, and a number of instructional strategies can be used to promote active learning and student centered education. A growing need for Lean competences was recently observed in the northern region of Portugal, and the corresponding rise on Lean MSc dissertations, in the local industry, followed. The Department of Production and Systems at University of Minho, in Portugal, has been introducing Lean in some curricula aiming at a larger audience and using a number of instructional strategies targeting more effective learning. The approaches taken to Lean instruction were scrutinized leading to a number of relevant findings, among which the identification of the ultimate customers and the value-add competence development activities, as well as a number of strategies that promote continuous improvement and enable pulled and levelled competence development. This markedly contrasts with the more traditional lecturer-centered pushed instruction.

Project-Based Learning as a Bridge to the Industrial Practice

It is expected that engineering students develop both technical and transversal competences for the professional practice during their initial training period. The development of such competences can benefit from the interaction with real industrial contexts. Since project-based learning is an educational approach in which teams of students can tackle a given problem related to their future professional practice, this will be an outstanding opportunity to bring them together with industrial engineering professionals throughout the whole degree period and not only at its end. In this way, teachers will facilitate the development of the expected professional competences. This work aims to analyse a project-based learning approach that has involved six teams of students dealing with real industrial problems and challenges, and to evaluate the results based on the proposed technical solutions, as well as on the perception of five companies’ representatives. Most of the proposed solutions were centred on Lean applications and ergonomic improvements of the analysed workplaces. Companies were very pleased with the developed projects and are willing to continue the interaction with the university in this context.

Effectiveness of SCRUM in Project Based Learning: Students View

Project and team management play a major role in the student team’s project performance. This is more evident when projects last a long time and the teams are large. In this work, a student team accepted to use SCRUM as their project management methodology during their Project Based Learning (PjBL) experience. This PjBL experience took place on the 7th semester of the Integrated Master in Industrial Engineering and Management degree. The team had a short period of time to train the technique and apply it throughout the entire semester. Although not very enthusiastic in the beginning of the project, the team gradually became aware of the advantages of SCRUM features, recognizing the feeling of having the project under control and gaining management effectiveness throughout the semester. In the end, the team performed well above the average, being one of the two teams with the highest score of the class.